Alternatives / Context.dev
Looking for an open source Context.dev alternative? We compared 3 open source web data tools by license and approach. Firecrawl and Crawl4AI return LLM-ready content, and Maxun is a no-code scraper with a visual recorder.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
We looked for open-source tools that turn web pages into structured data for AI agents. We verified each project's license, recent activity, stars, and self-hosting in its repository. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Firecrawl searches, scrapes, crawls, and interacts with live pages and returns Markdown, JSON, or screenshots, with PDF and DOCX parsing and MCP support. Crawl4AI is an async crawler with clean Markdown output and CSS, XPath, or LLM-based extraction.
Maxun turns websites into structured data with a visual recorder, natural language prompts, or an API, with scheduled monitoring and MCP support.
Firecrawl and Maxun are AGPL-3.0, so using them in a networked service has copyleft obligations. Firecrawl's hosted version uses proprietary infrastructure.
Firecrawl and Maxun are AGPL-3.0. Crawl4AI is Apache-2.0.
All three had commits within days of this update.
Context.dev is a proprietary API priced by usage. Open-source scrapers can run on your own infrastructure, but you provide browsers, proxies, and maintenance.
Firecrawl converts JavaScript-heavy web content into clean Markdown or structured data for AI systems, with search, scrape, crawl, and browser interaction such as click, scroll, and type. It handles PDFs and DOCX files, offers an MCP server, and has SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java, and Elixir. The code is AGPL-3.0, and the hosted cloud includes additional features that the open-source version lacks.
Pricing: Free to self-host; hosted free tier of 1,000 pages per month and paid plans.
Crawl4AI is an open-source web crawler and scraper that produces clean, structured output for LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agents. It offers Markdown generation, CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction, adaptive crawling, chunking, and browser control with hooks, proxies, and stealth modes, through a Python async API or Docker.
Pricing: Free and open source, with no forced API keys.
Maxun is a no-code platform for scraping, crawling, and extracting data from websites using a visual browser recorder or natural-language prompts. It supports full-site crawling, web search, scheduled monitoring, stealth and proxy rotation, multiple output formats, a REST API, Python and JavaScript SDKs, a CLI, and MCP support.
Pricing: Free and open source; self-hostable.
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Web data API | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | Closest replacement |
| Crawl4AI | Crawler | Apache-2.0 | Yes | RAG pipelines |
| Maxun | No-code scraper | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | Non-developers |
Want search plus scraping
Firecrawl returns search results with full-page Markdown.
Want a permissive license
Crawl4AI is Apache-2.0 and deploys with pip or Docker.
Want to scrape without code
Maxun records actions visually or takes natural language prompts.