head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs spider
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spider has 2,815 stars, 321 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 2,983% (86,783 vs 2,815 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; spider is written in Rust under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, spider 11%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 321 |
| 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 spider if
- You want the spider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and spider 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 spider
Spider The fastest web crawler and scraper for Rust. spider.cloud · Guides · Docs · Examples · Discord Spider is a concurrency first crawling engine written in Rust. It streams pages as they arrive, renders JavaScript only on pages that need it, and scales from a single script to a distributed fleet without changing your code. The same engine runs Spider Cloud, so you can prototype locally and move to managed infrastructure with one config change. Start in the cloud The hardest part of crawling at scale isn't the code. It's the proxies, headless browsers, and constant anti bot churn. Spider Cloud runs all of…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or spider more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and spider has 2,815. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and spider free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and spider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and spider?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and spider in Rust. 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 spider?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.