head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs spider
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars, 8,664 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. spider has 2,721 stars, 302 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 2,979% (83,782 vs 2,721 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%. spider 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.
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Side by side
| Crawl4AI | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 302 |
| 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 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 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 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 that…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or spider more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars and spider has 2,721. 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 (83,782 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.