webclaw is a free, open source data extraction & web scraping project written in Rust and released under AGPL-3.0. It has 2,352 GitHub stars, 231 forks and 3 open issues, and was last pushed 19 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #49 of 83 tracked projects in Data Extraction & Web Scraping, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available.

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webclaw

Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM-ready context.
CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines.

Stars Version License npm installs

Discord X / Twitter Hosted webclaw Docs

0xMassi/webclaw | Trendshift


Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs:

  • a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell
  • raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate

webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open-source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self-hostable server.

webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use.

webclaw https://example.com --format markdown
# Example Domain

This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents.

You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission.

Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through MCP, call the hosted API from your app, or self-host the OSS server.


Install

Agent setup

The fastest way to connect webclaw to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, Codex CLI, and other MCP-compatible tools:

npx create-webclaw

The installer detects supported clients and configures the MCP server for you.

Homebrew

brew tap 0xMassi/webclaw
brew install webclaw

Prebuilt binaries

Download macOS, Linux, and Windows binaries from GitHub Releases.

Windows (x64)

The prebuilt ZIP is the easiest installation and does not require Rust. On the v0.6.22 release page, download webclaw-v0.6.22-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip. Extract it in File Explorer, open PowerShell in the extracted folder containing webclaw.exe, and run:

.\webclaw.exe --version
.\webclaw.exe https://example.com --format markdown

PowerShell requires the .\ prefix for programs in the current directory. Add that directory to your user PATH only if you want to run webclaw from other folders. If Windows reports a missing Visual C++ runtime DLL, install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for x64. The ZIP contains x64 binaries; Windows ARM64 is not covered by the native installation check.

To build from source on Windows, install Rust with the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain, Visual Studio Build Tools with Desktop development with C++ and the Windows SDK, Git, CMake 3.22 or newer, LLVM (including libclang.dll), and NASM. Open a fresh Developer PowerShell for Visual Studio after installation. Ensure CMake and NASM are on PATH and set LIBCLANG_PATH to your LLVM bin directory if bindgen cannot find it, for example:

$env:LIBCLANG_PATH = "C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin"
cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git --tag v0.6.22 --locked webclaw-cli
webclaw --version

The Cargo package is webclaw-cli; the executable is webclaw. These packages are installed from Git, not crates.io. A first source build can take several minutes. The Windows CI workflow checks the Git installation and published ZIP on a hosted runner with preinstalled build tools; it does not model a clean PC. Linux containers, including Docker on macOS, do not validate Windows support.

Docker

docker run --rm ghcr.io/0xmassi/webclaw https://example.com

Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git --tag v0.6.22 --locked webclaw-cli
cargo install --git https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw.git --tag v0.6.22 --locked webclaw-mcp

If building from source fails because native build tools are missing, install the platform prerequisites:

OS Command
Debian / Ubuntu sudo apt install -y pkg-config libssl-dev cmake clang git build-essential
Fedora / RHEL sudo dnf install -y pkg-config openssl-devel cmake clang git make gcc
Arch sudo pacman -S pkg-config openssl cmake clang git base-devel
macOS xcode-select --install

Quick Start

Scrape one page

webclaw https://stripe.com --format markdown

Return LLM-optimized text

webclaw https://docs.anthropic.com --format llm

Keep only the main content

webclaw https://example.com/blog/post --only-main-content

Include or exclude selectors

webclaw https://example.com \
  --include "article, main, .content" \
  --exclude "nav, footer, .sidebar, .ad"

Crawl a documentation site

webclaw https://docs.rust-lang.org --crawl --depth 2 --max-pages 50

Workflow examples

Extract brand assets

webclaw https://github.com --brand

Compare a page over time

webclaw https://example.com/pricing --format json > pricing-old.json
webclaw https://example.com/pricing --diff-with pricing-old.json

MCP Server

webclaw ships with an MCP server for AI agents.

Zero-install — point any MCP client at the npx launcher:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webclaw": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@webclaw/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or run npx create-webclaw to auto-detect your AI tools and write their configs for you.

Then ask your agent things like:

Scrape these competitor pricing pages and summarize the differences.
Crawl this documentation site and prepare clean context for a RAG index.
Extract the brand colors, fonts, and logos from this company website.

Use as an agent skill

Add webclaw to Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and other MCP agents in one command:

npx skills add 0xMassi/webclaw-skill

Your agent gets scrape, crawl, map, extract, summarize, diff, brand, and search as native tools. Most sites extract locally with no API key. Set WEBCLAW_API_KEY to handle bot-protected and JavaScript-rendered pages.

Find it on skills.sh.


Tools

Tool What it does Local
scrape Extract one URL as markdown, text, JSON, LLM format, or HTML Yes
crawl Follow same-origin links and extract discovered pages Yes
map Discover URLs without extracting every page Yes
batch Scrape multiple URLs in parallel Yes
extract Convert page content into structured data Yes, with local or configured LLM
summarize Summarize a page Yes, with local or configured LLM
diff Compare page content snapshots Yes
brand Extract colors, fonts, logos, and metadata Yes
search Search the web and scrape results Ho

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is webclaw free to use?

webclaw is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does webclaw do?

Fast, local-first web content extraction for LLMs. Scrape, crawl, extract structured data — all from Rust. CLI, REST API, and MCP server.

What is webclaw written in?

webclaw is primarily written in Rust. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/0xMassi/webclaw, and it has 2,352 GitHub stars.