head to head · open source
firecrawl vs OpenPencil
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenPencil has 9,551 stars, 1,004 forks, 46 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 1,972% (197,942 vs 9,551 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; OpenPencil is written in TypeScript under MIT. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, OpenPencil 11%. firecrawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai), 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 | OpenPencil | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 9.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 OpenPencil if
- You want the OpenPencil feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and OpenPencil 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 OpenPencil
OpenPencil Open source design editor. Opens .fig and .pen design files, includes built in AI, and ships as a programmable toolkit with a headless Vue SDK for building custom editors. Status: Active development. Usable today, with some rough edges as features evolve. Try it online → · Download · Documentation · Roadmap · llms.txt Installation macOS (Homebrew): Or download from the releases page, or use the web app — no install needed. What it does Opens .fig and .pen files — read and write native Figma files, open supported Pencil documents from the app or OS file browser, copy & paste nodes between apps AI…
read the full OpenPencil overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or OpenPencil more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and OpenPencil has 9,551. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and OpenPencil free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and OpenPencil under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and OpenPencil?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and OpenPencil 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, firecrawl or OpenPencil?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose OpenPencil if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.