head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs xxl-crawler
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. xxl-crawler has 756 stars, 316 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 11,379% (86,783 vs 756 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; xxl-crawler is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, xxl-crawler 42%. 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 | xxl-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 756 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 316 |
| 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 xxl-crawler if
- You want the xxl-crawler 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 xxl-crawler 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 xxl-crawler
XXL CRAWLER XXL CRAWLER, a lightweight web crawler framework. Home Page Introduction XXL CRAWLER is a lightweight web crawler framework. A line of code to develop a multi threaded crawler, fully annotated way to collect page data to Java objects, with "multi threaded, fully annotated, JS rendering, proxy, distributed extension" and other features; XXL CRAWLER 是一个轻量级Java爬虫框架。一行代码开发一个多线程爬虫，全注解方式采集页面数据至Java对象，拥有"多线程、全注解、JS渲染、代理、分布式扩展"等特性； Documentation 中文文档 Features 1、简洁：API直观简洁，可快速上手； 2、轻量级：底层实现仅强依赖jsoup，简洁高效； 3、模块化：模块化的结构设计，可轻松扩展； 4、全注解：支持通过注解提取页面数据，高效映射页面数据到PageVO对象，底层自动完成PageVO对象的数据抽取和封装返回；单个页面支持抽取一个或多个PageVO；…
read the full xxl-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or xxl-crawler more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and xxl-crawler has 756. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and xxl-crawler free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and xxl-crawler under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and xxl-crawler?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and xxl-crawler 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 xxl-crawler?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose xxl-crawler if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.