head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs trawl
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trawl has 1,096 stars, 65 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 7,818% (86,783 vs 1,096 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; trawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, trawl 6%. trawl 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 | trawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 65 |
| 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 trawl if
- You want the trawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and trawl 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 trawl
TRAWL Welcome to TRAWL ! 👋 Self hosted web scraping engine with best effort JS challenge and CAPTCHA solving.\ Dedicated flows for Cloudflare, Akamai Bot Manager, and Imperva/Incapsula (best effort), plus Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, GeeTest, ALTCHA, and Friendly Captcha.\ Much faster and more reliable FlareSolverr & Byparr alternative and drop in replacement for your \ arr stack. Features 2 6x faster compared to FlareSolverr or Byparr it returns much faster with higher success rate 4 tier execution plain HTTP fetch → cached browser session → fresh challenge solve → residential proxy Challenge aware…
read the full trawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or trawl more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and trawl has 1,096. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and trawl free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and trawl under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and trawl?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and trawl in TypeScript. 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 trawl?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose trawl if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.