No-code
Maxun turns websites into structured data with a visual recorder or natural language prompts, with scheduled monitoring, proxy rotation, SDKs, and MCP support.
Alternatives / Octoparse
3 open-source alternatives
3 Best Open Source Octoparse Alternatives in 2026
Looking for an open source Octoparse alternative? We compared 3 open source scraping tools by license and approach. Maxun is the no-code option closest to Octoparse, while Firecrawl and Crawl4AI are developer-oriented.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
How we chose these Octoparse alternatives
We looked for open-source tools that extract data from websites. We verified each project's license, recent activity, stars, and self-hosting in its repository. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Developer tools
Firecrawl searches, scrapes, and crawls pages and returns Markdown, JSON, or screenshots, with JavaScript rendering and PDF parsing. Crawl4AI outputs clean data with CSS, XPath, or LLM-based extraction.
Important: licenses
Firecrawl and Maxun are AGPL-3.0, so using them in a networked service has copyleft obligations. Crawl4AI is Apache-2.0.
Maintenance status
All three had commits within days of this update.
Why look for a Octoparse alternative?
Octoparse is a proprietary desktop and cloud scraper priced by plan. Open-source tools remove per-task limits, but you manage browsers and proxies.
firecrawl.dev
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.
193.7K10.2KAGPL-3.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free to self-host; hosted free tier of 1,000 pages per month and paid plans.
- Search, scrape, crawl, and interaction in one API
- Many SDKs and MCP support
- Very large community
- AGPL-3.0 license
- The hosted cloud has features missing from the open-source version
crawl4ai.com
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.
86K8.9KApache-2.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free and open source, with no forced API keys.
- Apache-2.0 license
- Clean Markdown, adaptive crawling, and flexible extraction
- Python library and Docker deployment
- Python-centric
- You run browsers and proxies yourself
maxun.dev
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.
18K1.6KAGPL-3.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free and open source; self-hostable.
- Visual recorder and natural-language extraction
- Scheduled monitoring and a REST API
- SDKs and MCP support
- AGPL-3.0 license
- Less suited to large-scale crawling than Firecrawl or Crawl4AI
Compare Octoparse alternatives
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Web data API | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | AI pipelines |
| Crawl4AI | Crawler | Apache-2.0 | Yes | RAG pipelines |
| Maxun | No-code scraper | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | Closest replacement |
Which one should you choose?
Want to scrape without code
Maxun records actions visually and takes natural language prompts.
Want search plus scraping
Firecrawl returns full-page Markdown.