head to head
Fastcrawl vs Scrapling
Scrapling is the open source alternative to Fastcrawl — scraping and crawling api for ai agents, over rest and mcp. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Scrapling is a viable free replacement for Fastcrawl. Scrapling is open source under BSD-3-Clause, written in Python, with 98,203 GitHub stars, 10,287 forks and 6 open issues; it was last pushed 25 hours ago. Fastcrawl costs from $5, while self-hosting Scrapling 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 199,011 stars. Scrapling ranks #2 of 4 tracked open source Fastcrawl alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: firecrawl (199,011 stars), Crawl4AI (86,963 stars), crawlee (26,352 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Scrapling and 3 reasons to stay on Fastcrawl.
choose Scrapling 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
| Scrapling (open source) | Fastcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier 1500 credits/month; paid from $5/month |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — D4Vinci/Scrapling | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 98K · ⑂ 10K | — |
| Built with | Python | — |
Why people look for a Fastcrawl alternative
About Scrapling
Scrapling is an adaptive Python web scraping framework for developers, data teams, and regular users who need anything from a single request to a full scale crawl without rewriting selectors every time a site changes.
read the full Scrapling overview →
Other open source alternatives to Fastcrawl
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling a good replacement for Fastcrawl?
Scrapling is an open source alternative to Fastcrawl (Scraping and crawling API for AI agents, over REST and MCP). It is written in Python and licensed under BSD-3-Clause, with 98,203 GitHub stars.
Is Scrapling free compared to Fastcrawl?
Yes. Scrapling 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 Scrapling?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Scrapling's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.