Crawl4AI vs Diffbot
Crawl4AI is an Open source, while Diffbot is an AI extraction API. Crawl4AI fits best for: Python developers who want a free, self-hosted crawler for RAG/agent pipelines and full control over the stack. Diffbot fits best for: Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph.
| Crawl4AI | Diffbot | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | $10/mo | $299/mo |
| Free tier | Library and self-hosting free (Apache-2.0); Crawl4AI Cloud includes 1,000 free credits/month (10 req/min) | 10,000 credits/month, all APIs, 5 requests/min, no credit card |
| Pricing model | free/self-hosted; cloud uses credits | credits |
| AI extraction | ||
| Structured JSON | ||
| JS rendering | ||
| Proxies / anti-bot | ||
| API | ||
| No-code UI | ||
| Open source | ||
| MCP server | ||
| Best for | Python developers who want a free, self-hosted crawler for RAG/agent pipelines and full control over the stack. | Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph. |
| Visit Crawl4AI | Visit Diffbot |
Why choose Crawl4AI
- LLM extraction via any LiteLLM provider, plus CSS/XPath/regex
- Clean and 'fit' markdown output
- Playwright browser control, stealth, sessions, proxies
- Deep crawling strategies (BFS/DFS/best-first)
Watch out for
- You run and maintain the browsers and proxies yourself
- No built-in residential proxy network or managed unblocking
- LLM extraction costs depend on your own model provider
Why choose Diffbot
- Automatic Extract APIs (article, product, discussion etc.) with no rules
- Crawlbot for whole-site crawling
- Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles
- Natural-language processing API
Watch out for
- High jump from free to $299/mo
- Fixed page-type schemas; less flexible than prompt-based extraction
- Knowledge Graph credits are expensive per record
Our product
Only need structured JSON from pages?
BestAIScraper's extraction API takes a URL and a list of fields and returns typed JSON. Pay per use, no subscription.
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