head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs webmagic
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. webmagic has 11,676 stars, 4,100 forks, 367 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 617% (83,747 vs 11,676 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; webmagic is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, webmagic 35%. 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.
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Side by side
| Crawl4AI | webmagic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2025-12-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 webmagic if
- You want the webmagic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and webmagic 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 webmagic
WebMagic is an open source web crawler framework written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java ecosystem and is distributed through Maven Central as the us.codecraft:webmagic core and us.codecraft:webmagic extension artifacts. The project describes itself as a scalable crawler framework that covers the whole lifecycle of a crawler: downloading, URL management, content extraction, and persistence. Its architecture was written with reference to Scrapy, the Python crawler framework, and it has been maintained for roughly thirteen years, with the most recent push in December 2025.…
read the full webmagic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or webmagic more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and webmagic has 11,676. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and webmagic free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and webmagic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and webmagic?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and webmagic in Java. 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 webmagic?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose webmagic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.