head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs webmagic
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webmagic has 11,670 stars, 4,085 forks, 367 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 644% (86,783 vs 11,670 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. 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 | webmagic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 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: 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 webmagic
Readme in Chinese A scalable crawler framework. It covers the whole lifecycle of crawler: downloading, url management, content extraction and persistent. It can simplify the development of a specific crawler. Features: Simple core with high flexibility. Simple API for html extracting. Annotation with POJO to customize a crawler, no configuration. Multi thread and Distribution support. Easy to be integrated. Install: Add dependencies to your pom.xml: WebMagic use slf4j with slf4j log4j12 implementation. If you customized your slf4j implementation, please exclude slf4j log4j12. Get Started: First crawler: Write a…
read the full webmagic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or webmagic more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and webmagic has 11,670. 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 (86,783 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.