head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs skills
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skills has 6,310 stars, 339 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 1,275% (86,783 vs 6,310 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; skills is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, data-extraction), 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 | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 339 |
| 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 skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills 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 skills
What can BrowserAct be used for? BrowserAct enables AI agents and teams to perform real browser automation, web data extraction, and account based workflows. It helps agents get past anti bot walls, hand off to humans across platforms when stuck, run parallel tasks without cross contamination, and isolate multiple accounts in independent browsers, backed by stealth fingerprints, TLS rotation, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and stable fingerprint proxy setups for authenticated sessions. Two usage modes are available: fully cloud managed execution, or local browser control driven by your own agent workflow…
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or skills more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and skills has 6,310. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and skills free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and skills?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and skills 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 skills?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.