head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs selectolax
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. selectolax has 1,703 stars, 95 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 4,996% (86,783 vs 1,703 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; selectolax is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, selectolax 6%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, python, scraper), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Crawl4AI | selectolax | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 95 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick selectolax if
- You want the selectolax feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and selectolax fits your workflow better
About Crawl4AI
🚀🤖 Crawl4AI: Open source LLM Friendly Web Crawler & Scraper. 🚀 Crawl4AI Cloud API — Closed Beta (Launching Soon) Reliable, large scale web extraction, now built to be drastically more cost effective than any of the existing solutions. 👉 Apply here for early access We’ll be onboarding in phases and working closely with early users. Limited slots. Crawl4AI turns the web into clean, LLM ready Markdown for RAG, agents, and data pipelines. Fast, controllable, battle tested by a 50k+ star community. ✨ Check out latest update v0.9.3 ✨ New in v0.9.3 : Security release. Closes five coordinated disclosure advisories…
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
About selectolax
A fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors, written in Cython, using Modest and Lexbor engines. Installation From PyPI using pip: If installation fails due to compilation errors, you may need to install Cython: This usually happens when you try to install an outdated version of selectolax on a newer version of Python. Development version from GitHub: How to compile selectolax while developing: Basic examples Here are some basic examples to get you started with selectolax: Parsing HTML and extracting text: Using advanced CSS selectors Using lexbor contains CSS pseudo class to match text More examples Available…
read the full selectolax overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or selectolax more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and selectolax has 1,703. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and selectolax free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and selectolax under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and selectolax?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and selectolax in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Crawl4AI or selectolax?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose selectolax if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.