# BrowserAct vs Crawl4AI (slim)

> BrowserAct and Crawl4AI score within a point of each other for scraping, 44.4 and 43.9 out of 100. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-crawl4ai.md (~5,050 tokens) · this version ~2,380 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-crawl4ai.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-crawl4ai
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

BrowserAct and Crawl4AI score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 44.4 (E) and 43.9 (E). Crawl4AI leads on reliability, agent ergonomics, security & auth, payments & pricing, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do scraping.

- BrowserAct: E 44.4, rank #1204 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/browseract.min.md
- Crawl4AI: E 43.9, rank #1224 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crawl4ai.min.md
- BrowserAct, good for Teams that want no-code, prompt-built scrapers an agent can rerun on a schedule. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 76 against 55. Also No incidents deducted, where Crawl4AI loses 10 points for them.
- Crawl4AI, good for Agents that need cheap page-to-Markdown at volume, Google results and search in one key, or a free self-hosted Python crawler. Ahead on Reliability, 35 against 23; Agent ergonomics, 67 against 49; Security & auth, 46 against 41; Payments & pricing, 45 against 25; Maintenance & community, 83 against 61; Transparency & trust, 70 against 44. Also Free to start without a card; Open source.

| Category | BrowserAct | Crawl4AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 23 | 35 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 76 | 55 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 49 | 67 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 41 | 46 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 45 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 61 | 83 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 44 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | BrowserAct | Crawl4AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Hongkong Ziniao Technology Co., Limited | CONTEXT4AI PTE LTD |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.browseract.com/mcp/` | `https://api.crawl4ai.com/mcp` |
| Price for scraping | not published | $0.50 per 1,000 pages |
| Licence | none | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 16 |
| Last release | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-14 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-05-15 | 2026-10-15 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-05-15 | 2026-10-15 |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | none | 87k stars, 368k PyPI/wk |

Why the edge:
- Transparency & trust, Crawl4AI +26: BrowserAct 44 (Closed service with published terms naming the operating company and governing law (15). The privacy policy of 15 May 2025 states retention by category and that crawled data is kept per plan and deletable by the user (15). No deprecation policy or notices found (0). No sub-processors or data locations named (3). 15 + 15 + 0 + 3 = 33.); Crawl4AI 70 (The library is Apache-2.0 and the cloud is closed under terms that name CONTEXT4AI PTE LTD (22 of 30). The privacy policy gives retention periods (account plus 90 days, usage records 13 months, logs 90 days), but none for crawled content, and llms.txt says repeated URLs are served from a shared archive while the security page says fetched pages are used only to answer the request (18 of 30). The legacy cloud API closed on 6 November 2026 with a migration guide but no dated notice found, and the terms promise notice of material changes only 'where reasonable' (8 of 20). Subprocessors named with their locations on the security page, with EU storage of account records (18 of 20). 22 + 18 + 8 + 18 = 66.)
- Maintenance & community, Crawl4AI +22: BrowserAct 61 (browser-act-cli 1.6.2 on 5 November 2026, read from PyPI's release feed (30). Six CLI releases from 15 October to 5 November (20). A closed service with a support address, but no public changelog or issue tracker found (8). No official SDKs and no entry in the official MCP registry (0). The CLI package carries no licence or repository in its metadata (3). 30 + 20 + 8 + 0 + 3 = 61.); Crawl4AI 83 (Library v0.9.5 on 14 October 2026, 23 days before 6 November, and the cloud added /serp on 8 October (30). v0.9.3 (31 August), v0.9.4 (23 September) and v0.9.5 (14 October) in the 90 days from 8 August (20). 56 open issues on 6 November, the newest triaged with Bug, Needs Triage, In-progress, Root caused or Done labels within days, plus a Discord. Reply authors weren't read (20 of 25). Not in the official MCP registry, and the cloud has no official SDK; the Python library is current on PyPI (8 of 15). The security workflow runs a test suite and a default-posture gate, and releases are built and checked with twine. No general test workflow on push found (5 of 10). 30 + 20 + 20 + 8 + 5 = 83.)
- Schema & documentation, BrowserAct +21: BrowserAct 76 (An OpenAPI 3.0.3 document behind the API reference (25). llms.txt on both the site and the docs, with Markdown pages (10). Endpoint descriptions explain the run flow (find a bot, read its input_schema, then run) and when to use the lighter status endpoint (14). Inputs are typed, but a run's input is an object shaped by each bot's own schema (10). Examples per endpoint and named error codes such as 10879 and 10127; no full error table found (10). The path carries v3, but no changelog was found (7). 25 + 10 + 14 + 10 + 10 + 7 = 76.); Crawl4AI 55 (No OpenAPI or similar contract for the cloud API, and the MCP tool schemas are only in the live tools/list, which needs a key. /v1/prices is machine-readable but covers prices, not calls (0). llms.txt of 304 lines written for agents (10). Each endpoint says what it is for and when to choose another, such as trying without a proxy first, using `browser` only when `auto` misses content and /scrape/jobs for slow lists (16 of 20). Parameters are listed with types, defaults, allowed values (`format` both, md or html; `proxy` none, isp or residential) and limits, in prose (10 of 15). Curl examples per endpoint and documented error strings per status with whether each is charged (14 of 15). No changelog for the cloud API, only dated notes such as /serp 'added 8 Oct 2026'. The library has a dated CHANGELOG (5 of 15). 0 + 10 + 16 + 10 + 14 + 5 = 55.)
- Payments & pricing, Crawl4AI +20: BrowserAct 25 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices and credit costs per bot build, run and workflow step are public, but there is no direct per-call price (15). A free plan with 200 credits; whether it needs a card isn't stated (10). A person signs up and creates the key in the dashboard (0). 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 25.); Crawl4AI 45 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-endpoint credit costs, effort multipliers and plan rates are public at /v1/prices without a login, with 1 credit = $0.001 (20). 1,000 free credits a month, no card (20). A 7-day pass key comes from a click on api.crawl4ai.com without an account, which is still a person in a browser, and a permanent key needs email verification (5 of 20). 0 + 20 + 20 + 5 = 45.)
- Agent ergonomics, Crawl4AI +18: BrowserAct 49 (Graded on the API, since the MCP tool list isn't published. Task results come back whole, with no field selection found (10). Lists of bots, templates and tasks are paginated (15). Errors carry numeric codes with documented meanings for a few cases (12). No idempotency key on task creation; webhooks and a status endpoint avoid polling loops (5). No official SDK in two languages; the CLI is Python (7). 10 + 15 + 12 + 5 + 7 = 49.); Crawl4AI 67 (16 MCP tools, six of them for billing and support (15 of 25). `format` md or html, `parse` opt-in blocks, batch limits and job results paged 500 at a time over HTTP and 50 over MCP (16 of 20). String error codes an agent can branch on (blocked, login-wall, no-answer, busy, no_credit, plan_cap, spend_cap), each with whether it is charged (18 of 20). Failed and cancelled calls aren't charged and `jobs_submit` takes an idempotency key, but no tool annotations are documented and two tools can charge the saved card (10 of 20). Only `url` or `q` is required. There is no official SDK for the cloud API; the docs give curl and standard-library Python and Node examples (8 of 15). 15 + 16 + 18 + 10 + 8 = 67.)
- Reliability, Crawl4AI +12: BrowserAct 23 (Hosted reading. No status page found (0) and no readable incident history (5). The docs say there are no rate limits, and give concurrency by plan (2 free, up to 20 for paid API users) and a 7-hour task cap (8). No 429 or retry guidance, and no idempotency keys on task creation (0). No SLA (0). No beta label on the API or MCP server (10). 0 + 5 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 23.); Crawl4AI 35 (Graded on the hosted lines, for Crawl4AI Cloud, which the README and llms.txt now lead with and which an agent calls through its MCP server; the library would read on the local lines. No status page is linked, and status.crawl4ai.com fails TLS (0). No incident history readable (5). Per-plan limits are published with numbers in /v1/prices, from 10 requests a minute and 2 at a time on Free to 1,500 and 50 on Scale (15). 429 carries X-RateLimit headers and a message, 503 busy says to resend after a few seconds, and MCP job submissions take an idempotency key, but no Retry-After or backoff guidance (10 of 15). No SLA found in the terms or pricing (0). Prices and the free credit are a soft launch, /serp is beta and /answer experimental, while scrape, extract and search carry no beta label (5 of 10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 10 + 0 + 5 = 35.)