# Crawl4AI vs jevcrawl (slim)

> jevcrawl scores 64.3 (B) to Crawl4AI's 43.9 (E) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crawl4ai-vs-jevcrawl.md (~5,500 tokens) · this version ~2,930 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crawl4ai-vs-jevcrawl.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crawl4ai-vs-jevcrawl
- 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)

jevcrawl scores 64.3 (B) on agent readiness against Crawl4AI's 43.9 (E), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Crawl4AI leads on payments & pricing, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do scraping.

- Crawl4AI: E 43.9, rank #1224 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crawl4ai.min.md
- jevcrawl: B 64.3, rank #473 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/jevcrawl.min.md
- 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 Payments & pricing, 45 against 30; Maintenance & community, 83 against 68; Transparency & trust, 70 against 51. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Free to start without a card.
- jevcrawl, good for An agent that must find one answer several clicks deep on a documentation or help site and wants a few thousand tokens back instead of whole pages. Ahead on Reliability, 68 against 35; Schema & documentation, 81 against 55; Agent ergonomics, 80 against 67; Security & auth, 59 against 46. Also Runs on your own machine; No incidents deducted, where Crawl4AI loses 10 points for them.

| Category | Crawl4AI | jevcrawl |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 68 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 55 | 81 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 67 | 80 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 46 | 59 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 45 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 68 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 70 | 51 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Crawl4AI | jevcrawl |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | CONTEXT4AI PTE LTD | Rayen Mlayeh |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.crawl4ai.com/mcp` | no (local only) |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | stdio |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | $0.50 per 1,000 pages | not published |
| Tools exposed | 16 | 3 |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-14 | 2026-10-15 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-10-15 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-10-15 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Popularity | 87k stars, 368k PyPI/wk | 60 stars, 204 PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, jevcrawl +33: 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.); jevcrawl 68 (Read as local software, though `crawl` and `map` also depend on TypeSafe's hosted Jev API. Installs from PyPI with Python 3.11 or later stated (20). CI runs ruff, mypy strict and the offline tests on Python 3.11 and 3.13, and every CI run on main from 11 to 15 October 2026 passed, per the 15 October check; the workflow is unchanged, and run results couldn't be read on 2 November (25). Eight issues, all opened by the maintainer as a roadmap, two closed, per the 15 October check. No outside bug reports were found then, and the project is three weeks old, so there is little record to read (15). Semver tags with GitHub release notes, no CHANGELOG file, v0.1.0's notes only a commit link, and breaking changes not marked (8). Version 0.2.0, still classified Development Status 3 Alpha (0). 20 + 25 + 15 + 8 + 0 = 68.)
- Schema & documentation, jevcrawl +26: 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.); jevcrawl 81 (Typed JSON Schema inputs on all three tools, generated from the Python signatures, with required parameters marked (25). No llms.txt. The repository ships an agent skill, `skills/jevcrawl/SKILL.md`, as Markdown for agents (5). Tool descriptions and server instructions say when to use `crawl`, `scrape` and `map`, how to phrase a goal and how to read each stop reason (18). Integer and number types with defaults, but the minimums the code enforces are not in the schema and `stopped_because` is documented as prose, not an enum (10). A real result in the README, and error codes listed in the skill with what each means (13). Semver releases with notes, and the Jev model version pinned per release (10).)
- Transparency & trust, Crawl4AI +19: 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.); jevcrawl 51 (Apache-2.0 in LICENSE, pyproject.toml and as detected by GitHub (30). The README says plainly that page text, link labels and URLs go to TypeSafe and that answers are cached locally. TypeSafe's policies agree on no training but give no retention period, and jevcrawl has no privacy statement of its own (15). No deprecation policy. The model version is pinned and changes are in release notes (3). No telemetry or analytics found in the source. Outbound traffic is the target site and api.typesafe.ai, both stated in the README, so there is nothing hidden to opt out of, though no explicit telemetry statement exists (15).)
- Payments & pricing, Crawl4AI +15: 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.); jevcrawl 30 (No payment protocol (0). The package is free, so read with the rule for the paid option it needs, TypeSafe's Jev. Per-token price published at $0.042 per million input tokens for jev-1.13.0 and jev-1.14.0, re-read on 2 November (20). No free Jev tier found. `scrape` without a goal works with no key, which is a small free path (5 of 20). A person has to sign in at console.typesafe.ai, and TypeSafe describes Jev as early access. The console answered 403 to our reader. Keyless goal-less scraping earns a little (5 of 20).)
- Maintenance & community, Crawl4AI +15: 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.); jevcrawl 68 (v0.2.0 on 15 October 2026, 18 days before 2 November (30). Three releases between 13 and 15 October 2026 (20). One later change, the merged audit-fixes pull request of 26 October (redirect scope, per-step time limits, a 50 MB cap on gzip sitemaps), is in no release yet. No outside issues or pull requests were found on 15 October, and GitHub's issue pages couldn't be read on 2 November (8 of 25). Not in the official MCP registry, which returned no server for jevcrawl on 2 November (0). Current dependencies, a uv.lock, CI and PyPI trusted publishing in the workflows (10). 30 + 20 + 8 + 0 + 10 = 68.)
- Agent ergonomics, jevcrawl +13: 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.); jevcrawl 80 (Three compact tools (25). `max_pages`, `max_seconds`, `return_tokens` and `limit` bound every call, and `scrape` can return a whole page or only the passages for a goal. No pagination is needed (18). Expected failures come back as `{error, message}` with a message that says what to do, and `stopped_because`, `degraded` and `needs_js_urls` tell the agent why a result is thin (19). All tools read only and repeats are answered from a local cache at no cost, but there are no readOnlyHint or idempotentHint annotations (10). Only `goal` and `start_url` are required, with measured defaults. The Python library is usable but undocumented (an open issue), and there is one language (8).)