What it does
Crawl4AI is a web crawler, a program that visits web pages and collects their content. It converts pages into tidy Markdown (simple formatted text), keeping headings, tables and links while removing clutter like menus and footers.
This makes web content easy to feed into AI models, for example so a chatbot can answer questions about a website. It can also pull specific details from a page into structured data.
You can run it yourself for free as a Python library or with Docker. There is also a paid hosted service, Crawl4AI Cloud, with a free monthly allowance.
Who it's for
Developers building AI apps, search tools or data pipelines that need content from the web.
Can I use it without coding?
Developers only. Used from Python code or as a self-hosted server. The hosted cloud version is used through an API. New to this? Start here.
Can I run it?
- Cost
- Free, with optional paid extrasThe open-source version is free; the makers also sell a hosted or pro version.
- Runs on
- Server, Cloud
- Privacy
- Your choice: run it on your device or use an online service
- API key
- Not needed
Try it
Using Claude Code, Cursor or another AI coding assistant? Paste the prompt and it will walk you through the setup.New to this?
Before you install
- Only download from the official GitHub page. Copies with similar names exist for many popular projects.
- License (Apache-2.0): Permissive: free to use, change and share, including for business.
- More on staying safe