head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs crawlee
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 224% (83,747 vs 25,823 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. crawlee 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 | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee 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 crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or crawlee more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and crawlee free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and crawlee?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and crawlee 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 crawlee?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.