head to head · open source
firecrawl vs SearXNG
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SearXNG has 39,138 stars, 3,572 forks, 215 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 406% (197,942 vs 39,138 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; SearXNG is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, SearXNG 9%. firecrawl 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
| firecrawl | SearXNG | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 39K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 3.6K |
| 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 SearXNG if
- You want the SearXNG feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and SearXNG 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 SearXNG
.. SPDX License Identifier: AGPL 3.0 or later .. metasearch engine: .. Installation guide: .. Configuration guide: .. CONTRIBUTING: .. LICENSE: .. figure:: :target: :alt: SearXNG :width: 512px SearXNG is a metasearch engine . Users are neither tracked nor profiled. .. image:: :target: :alt: Organization .. image:: :target: :alt: Documentation .. image:: :target: :alt: License .. image:: :target: :alt: Commits .. image:: :target: :alt: Translated Setup ===== To install SearXNG, see Installation guide . To fine tune SearXNG, see Configuration guide . Further information on how to can be found here . Connect…
read the full SearXNG overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or SearXNG more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and SearXNG has 39,138. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and SearXNG free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and SearXNG under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and SearXNG?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and SearXNG 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 SearXNG?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose SearXNG if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.