head to head · open source
firecrawl vs parlant
firecrawl has 181,627 GitHub stars, 9,834 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parlant has 18,290 stars, 1,555 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. firecrawl leads on adoption by 893% (181,627 vs 18,290 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; parlant is written in Python under Apache-2.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, parlant 9%. firecrawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, llm), 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 | parlant | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 182K | ★ 18K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 182K 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 parlant if
- You want the parlant 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 parlant fits your workflow better
About firecrawl
Firecrawl is an open source web context API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with websites at scale. It lives in the AI and data extraction ecosystem, providing structured, LLM ready outputs from unstructured web content. Built in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL 3.0, it supports both self hosting and a hosted service via firecrawl.dev.
read the full firecrawl overview →
About parlant
Parlant is a Python project licensed under Apache 2.0, and it presents itself as an interaction control harness for customer facing AI agents. It lives in the open source large language model ecosystem, with topic tags for ai agents, llm, openai, gemini, llama3, genai, python, customer service, customer success, and ai alignment. The README describes a server based Python SDK for creating agents, observations, and guidelines.
read the full parlant overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or parlant more popular?
firecrawl has 181,627 GitHub stars and parlant has 18,290. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and parlant free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and parlant under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and parlant?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and parlant 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 parlant?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (181,627 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose parlant if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.