Crawl4AI vs. ScraperAPI vs. UseScraper vs. scrapestack Comparison Chart

Crawl4AI is an open source web crawler and scraper designed for large language models, AI agents, and data pipelines. It generates clean Markdown suitable for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines or direct ingestion into LLMs, performs structured extraction using CSS, XPath, or LLM-based methods, and offers advanced browser control with features like hooks, proxies, stealth modes, and session reuse. The platform emphasizes high performance through parallel crawling and chunk-based extraction, aiming for real-time applications. Crawl4AI is fully open source, providing free access without forced API keys or paywalls, and is highly configurable to meet diverse data extraction needs. Its core philosophies include democratizing data by being free to use, transparent, and configurable, and being LLM-friendly by providing minimally processed, well-structured text, images, and metadata for easy consumption by AI models.

UseScraper is a powerful web crawler and scraper API designed for speed and efficiency. By entering any website URL, users can retrieve page content in seconds. For those needing comprehensive data extraction, the Crawler can fetch sitemaps or perform link crawling, processing thousands of pages per minute using the auto-scaling infrastructure. The platform supports output in plain text, HTML, or Markdown formats, catering to various data processing needs. Utilizing a real Chrome browser with JavaScript rendering, UseScraper ensures the successful processing of even the most complex web pages. Features include multi-site crawling, exclusion of specific URLs or site elements, webhook updates for crawl job status, and a data store accessible via API. The service offers a pay-as-you-go plan with 10 concurrent jobs and a rate of $1 per 1,000 web pages, as well as a Pro plan for $99 per month, which includes advanced proxies, unlimited concurrent jobs, and priority support.