Crawl4AI vs Jina Reader
Two of the top data and scraping for ai, side by side: score, setup, license, activity and what each review found.
Crawl4AI
Python crawler that turns pages into LLM-ready markdown, with a Docker API
Jina Reader
Converts any URL or search query into LLM-friendly markdown
| What we compare | Crawl4AI | Jina Reader |
|---|---|---|
| Score parts, out of 100 | ||
| Adoption | 70, popular | 20, niche |
| Freshness | 100, active | 81, active |
| Maintenance | 82, healthy | 15, weak |
| Easy to run | 67, easy | 50, easy |
| Agent-ready | 0, none | 40, minimal |
| Facts from GitHub and the README | ||
| Stars | 85.2k | 12.1k |
| License | Apache-2.0 (permissive) | Apache-2.0 (permissive) |
| Last commit | Oct 2026 | May 2026 |
| Last release | Sep 2026 | None published |
| Language | Not stated | Not stated |
| Docker | Yes | Yes |
| GPU | Not needed | Not needed |
| arm64 or Apple Silicon | Mentioned | Not stated |
Crawl4AI
Async Playwright crawler (pip install crawl4ai) that renders pages in Chromium, Firefox or WebKit and emits clean or filtered markdown, with CSS, XPath and regex extraction needing no LLM, or LLM extraction via any LiteLLM provider. Deep crawling (BFS, DFS, priority-scored) and adaptive crawling are built in. A Docker server on port 11235 exposes /md, /html, /crawl, /screenshot, /pdf and MCP behind an API token.
Who it is for: Developers building scrapers and RAG ingestion pipelines
Strengths
- Structured extraction with CSS, XPath or regex schemas needs no LLM or API key
- Docker server with REST, streaming crawl, MCP, dashboard and playground; amd64 and arm64
- Deep crawl strategies with crash recovery via resume_state
- Persistent browser profiles, CDP remote browsers and an undetected-browser adapter
Weaknesses
- Apache-2.0 but requires attribution (badge or text) in your project
- Docker server answers only inside the container until CRAWL4AI_API_TOKEN is set
- Web search and answer endpoints exist only in the paid cloud
- Runs full browsers; the docker run example allocates 1 GB shared memory
- no GPU
- Docker + Compose
- Needs Playwright Chromium (installed by crawl4ai-setup)
- Models: any LiteLLM provider for LLM extraction (OpenAI, Ollama and others)
- port 11235
Jina Reader
Open-source branch of the service behind r.jina.ai and s.jina.ai: fetches a page with headless Chrome or curl-impersonate, parses PDFs and Office files, and returns markdown, text, HTML, screenshots or JSON controlled by request headers (engine, timeout, token limits). The ghcr.io image bundles Chrome, LibreOffice and CJK fonts, serves HTTP/1.1 on 8081 and h2c on 8080, and runs stateless or with S3-compatible caching.
Who it is for: Developers feeding web pages and documents to LLMs
Strengths
- Prebuilt image with Chrome, LibreOffice and CJK fonts; stateless by default
- Fine-grained headers: x-respond-timing, x-max-tokens, x-token-budget, x-target-selector
- Optional VLM captions for images without alt text
- Semantic markdown chunking by heading or block level
Weaknesses
- Hosted proxy pool, rate limiting and MongoDB storage layer are not in the OSS branch
- Needs non-redistributable assets (MaxMind GeoLite2, Source Han Sans) fetched at build
- Last commit May 2026; the SaaS resync was April 2026
- Default h2c port 8080 needs --http2-prior-knowledge from curl; use 8081 otherwise
- no GPU
- Docker + Compose
- Needs Headless Chrome and LibreOffice (bundled in image), S3-compatible bucket (optional cache), VLM endpoint for image captions (optional)
- port 8081