Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl
Crawl4AI (Crawl4AI) and Firecrawl (Firecrawl) side by side on public data, as of Oct 9, 2026.
Firecrawl has 7.7x the weekly package downloads of Crawl4AI (2.7M against 351K). Firecrawl has 2.2x the GitHub stars of Crawl4AI (190K against 85K). Over the last 30 days downloads moved -6% for Crawl4AI and -6% for Firecrawl. Crawl4AI shipped 3 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Crawl4AI | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Gid Score | 55 | 63 |
| Overall rank | #35 | #14 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 351K | 2.7M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 5.9% | down 3.5% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | down 6.5% | down 5.6% |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 85K | 190K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 0 | 12 |
| Latest stable release | 0.9.4 · 16d ago | 2.11.0 · 3mo ago |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 3 | 0 |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free + $16/mo |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| First released | — | — |
| Interfaces | Python library, Docker, REST API | REST API, Python SDK, TypeScript SDK, MCP server |
| Models |
Trends
Crawl4AI
An open-source web crawler and scraper that turns any website into clean, LLM-ready Markdown, run on your own machine or through Crawl4AI Cloud.
Pricing: Free and open source to self-host. Crawl4AI Cloud is pay as you go with $10, $25 and $100 credit packs.
Latest release 0.9.4:
- PyPI: bash pip install crawl4ai==0.9.4
- Docker: bash docker pull unclecode/crawl4ai:0.9.4 docker pull unclecode/crawl4ai:latest
- Note: Docker images are being built and will be available shortly. Check the Docker Release workflow for build status.
Firecrawl
Turns websites into clean Markdown or structured data for AI agents: scrape, crawl, map and search the web through one API.
Pricing: Free plan with 1,000 credits a month. Hobby is $16 a month (5,000 credits) and Standard $83 a month (100,000 credits), billed yearly. Self-hosting the open-source version is free.
Latest release 2.11.0:
- Firecrawl Research Index — Added a specialized index for agentic AI/ML research: search across 3M+ arXiv papers and the GitHub code behind them (issues, merged PRs, and READMEs, refreshed daily),…
- Keyless access for core endpoints — Use /scrape, /search, /interact, and /parse without an API key from official MCP, CLI, and SDK clients.
- Automatic PII redaction — Added a redactPII option that strips personal and sensitive data like names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and secrets out of scraped content before it's returned.
- deterministicJson format — Added a format that returns structured JSON without running an LLM on every request. Firecrawl generates a reusable extractor for your schema and caches it per site, so…