# Crawl4AI vs Spider (slim)

> Spider scores 74.6 (BB) 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-spider-cloud.md (~5,050 tokens) · this version ~2,380 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crawl4ai-vs-spider-cloud.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crawl4ai-vs-spider-cloud
- 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)

Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Crawl4AI's 43.9 (E), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Crawl4AI leads on maintenance & community. Both do scraping. Spider accepts x402. Crawl4AI doesn't.

- Crawl4AI: E 43.9, rank #1224 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crawl4ai.min.md
- Spider: BB 74.6, rank #78 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spider-cloud.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 Maintenance & community, 83 against 75. Also Free to start without a card.
- Spider, good for An agent that has to start without a human, pay per call, or crawl many small pages cheaply. Ahead on Reliability, 85 against 35; Schema & documentation, 87 against 55; Payments & pricing, 96 against 45. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account; Runs on your own machine; No incidents deducted, where Crawl4AI loses 10 points for them.

| Category | Crawl4AI | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 85 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 55 | 87 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 67 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 46 | 42 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 45 | 96 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 75 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 70 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Crawl4AI | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | CONTEXT4AI PTE LTD | Spider (BAGELMEN LLC) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.crawl4ai.com/mcp` | `https://api.spider.cloud` |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | $0.50 per 1,000 pages | $0.50 per 1,000 requests |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.0005/call |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 16 | 21 |
| MCP registry | not listed | `cloud.spider/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-10-14 | 2026-09-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-10-15 | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-10-15 | 2026-10-01 |
| Popularity | 87k stars, 368k PyPI/wk | 2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (8) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Spider +51: 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.); Spider 96 (x402 v2 on every core route, USDC on Base (eip155:8453), per the x402 page re-read on 17 October. Our unpaid POST to /crawl on 6 October got a 402 with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header and an x402Version 2 body asking 5,000 units ($0.005), not re-run on 17 October because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (40). Bytes, CPU minutes and credit prices are public (20). Keyless POST /scrape, documented in llms.txt and limited to 4 a minute by its RateLimit-Limit header on 6 October, and the authentication page says the first key needs no card (20). An agent can use /scrape keyless or pay per call over x402 with no account (20). 100 less 4 because AI Studio routes need a plan from $6 a month.)
- Reliability, Spider +50: 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.); Spider 85 (Statuspage at spidercloud.statuspage.io with API and HTTP Proxy components (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November (robots.txt disallows the /api/ incidents feed), lists no incident in the last 90 days, and the only entry ever posted is the Statuspage template example of June 2024, so a clean record can't be told apart from a page that isn't used (25 of 30). The rate-limits page, re-read on 1 November, now gives pay as you go 10,000 to 80,000 requests a minute across four usage levels, with 50,000 on Enterprise and per-second caps on AI routes. Keyless /scrape answered RateLimit-Limit 4 on 6 October, not re-run since, because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (15). RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset headers, Retry-After on 429 per llms.txt, and an exponential backoff example on the rate-limits page (15). No SLA found (0). Generally available (10). 20 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 85.)
- Schema & documentation, Spider +32: 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.); Spider 87 (OpenAPI 3.0.1 at spider.cloud/openapi.yaml with 15 paths, re-read on 1 November (25). llms.txt written for agents (10). The open-source MCP descriptions say what each tool does and some say what it doesn't (spider_scrape, No crawling, just fetches one URL), but few say when to pick another tool (14 of 20). 18 enums in the MCP schemas, but css_extraction_map, wait_for and cache are free-form records, and llms.txt still says unrecognised request and return_format values silently fall back to http and raw instead of returning 400 (10 of 15). Error code table with 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 413, 429, 500 and 503, and examples per route (13 of 15). Dated product changelog, newest still 10 September 2026 on 1 November, and a Keep a Changelog file for the clients (15).)
- Maintenance & community, Crawl4AI +8: 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.); Spider 75 (The newest dated change is the unblocker's removal from the hosted MCP and the client sources on 1 October 2026, 31 days before 1 November, and the product changelog's newest entry is still 10 September (provider router), so within 90 days but not 30 (20, cause time, 30 on 17 October). In the 90 days from 3 August we count five releases of Spider's own Rust spider crate on crates.io (2.53.5 on 17 August, 2.53.6 on 18 August, 2.53.7 on 1 September, 2.53.8 on 3 September and 2.53.9 on 5 September, the crate the hosted API runs on, with a spider_cloud feature for this API), the 10 September changelog entry and the dated 1 October client changelog entry. The @spider-cloud/spider-client 0.2.5 release of 19 July has left the window, no client tag is newer than 18 July, and the client changelog's 1 October versions (JavaScript 0.3.0, Python 0.2.0) have no release tags in the repository on 1 November. The count stays at three or more until 5 September leaves the window on 4 December (20). We couldn't read GitHub issues. Dated changelog and support by email (12 of 25). In the official MCP registry as cloud.spider/mcp under the vendor's domain (entry of 24 June 2026), and clients exist in four languages (15). The clients repo runs CI for Node, Python and Rust. The MCP repo has no CI (8 of 10). 20 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 75.)