head to head · open source
firecrawl vs Crawl4AI
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI has 86,783 stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 128% (197,942 vs 86,783 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Crawl4AI 10%. firecrawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 7 topic tags (ai, ai-agents, crawler, data-extraction), 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
| firecrawl | Crawl4AI | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 87K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 9.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 198K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Crawl4AI if
- You want the Crawl4AI feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Crawl4AI fits your workflow better
About firecrawl
🔥 Firecrawl The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. 🔥 The web context API to find sources, extract content, and turn it into clean Markdown or structured data your agents can ship with. Open source and available as a hosted service. Pst. Hey, you, join our stargazers :) Why Firecrawl? Industry leading reliability : Covers 96% of the web, including JS heavy pages — no proxy headaches, just clean data (see benchmarks) Blazingly fast : P95 latency of 3.4s across millions of pages, built for real time agents and dynamic apps LLM ready output : Clean markdown, structured JSON, screenshots…
read the full firecrawl overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or Crawl4AI more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and Crawl4AI has 86,783. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and Crawl4AI free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Crawl4AI under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and Crawl4AI?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and Crawl4AI in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, firecrawl or Crawl4AI?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Crawl4AI if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.