head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs skills
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. skills has 5,946 stars, 295 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 1,308% (83,747 vs 5,946 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.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Crawl4AI | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 295 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 84K 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 is an open source web crawler and scraper designed to prepare website content for large language model (LLM) workflows. It lives in the Python ecosystem and targets data extraction for RAG, agents, and AI pipelines. Unlike many tools that require API keys or paid subscriptions, Crawl4AI provides direct, self hosted access to web content with output structured specifically for LLM consumption.
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
About skills
BrowserAct Skills is a browser automation CLI built for AI agents, distributed as an open source Python project under the MIT license. It lives in the agent infrastructure ecosystem, alongside tooling for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agent clients, and it is catalogued here under Data Extraction and Web Scraping. The project has gathered roughly 5,900 stars and 293 forks since it was published about a year ago, with a small open issue count and an active last push.
read the full skills overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or skills more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and skills has 5,946. 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 (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.