head to head
Fastcrawl vs crawlee
crawlee is the open source alternative to Fastcrawl — scraping and crawling api for ai agents, over rest and mcp. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — crawlee is a viable free replacement for Fastcrawl. crawlee is open source under Apache-2.0, written in TypeScript, with 25,865 GitHub stars, 1,679 forks and 135 open issues; it was last pushed 17 hours ago. Fastcrawl costs from $5, while self-hosting crawlee carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Fastcrawl alternatives are tracked here, led by firecrawl at 183,038 stars. crawlee ranks #4 of 4 tracked open source Fastcrawl alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: firecrawl (183,038 stars), Crawl4AI (84,048 stars), Scrapling (82,865 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to crawlee and 3 reasons to stay on Fastcrawl.
choose crawlee if
- Your Fastcrawl bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Fastcrawl if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Fastcrawl integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| crawlee (open source) | Fastcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier 2,000 credits/month; paid from $5/month |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — apify/crawlee | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 26K · ⑂ 1.7K | — |
| Built with | TypeScript | — |
Why people look for a Fastcrawl alternative
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
Other open source alternatives to Fastcrawl
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee a good replacement for Fastcrawl?
crawlee is an open source alternative to Fastcrawl (Scraping and crawling API for AI agents, over REST and MCP). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under Apache-2.0, with 25,865 GitHub stars.
Is crawlee free compared to Fastcrawl?
Yes. crawlee is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Fastcrawl is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Fastcrawl to crawlee?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check crawlee's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.