About acrawl
acrawl is an open-source browser agent and MCP server, shipped as a single Rust binary. You describe a web task in plain English; it navigates, clicks, fills forms, watches the network and returns structured data. It is MIT-licensed, runs on your own machine and uses your own LLM key.
Why it exists
Section titled “Why it exists”Most browser agents stop at navigating and clicking, and most need a Python or Node runtime, a cloud account, or both. acrawl started from three convictions:
- An agent should see what a developer sees. Network requests, console errors, performance and accessibility are first-class tools, not an afterthought. That makes acrawl useful for debugging a page, not only for scraping it.
- Pay for intelligence once. Use the model to work out a crawl, then replay it as a deterministic script with no model calls at all.
- Nothing to install but the binary. One executable for Linux, macOS and Windows, with a stealth browser fetched on first use. No Docker, no virtualenv, no hosted service.
Who builds it
Section titled “Who builds it”acrawl is created and maintained by Mingye Lu, with code from outside contributors. Development happens in public on GitHub: every change goes through a pull request and continuous integration, the test suite runs to more than 1,100 tests, and each release is built for five platforms.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| First commit | March 30, 2026 |
| First release (0.1.0) | April 29, 2026 |
| Real-browser extension bridge (0.5.0) | May 21, 2026 |
| Built-in MCP server (0.6.0) | May 22, 2026 |
| This website | October 2026 |
Every release is listed with its notes in the changelog.
How it is built
Section titled “How it is built”- Rust, in a workspace of 11 crates: provider clients, browser bridges, the agent and its tools, the conversation runtime, the terminal UI and the MCP server. See How acrawl works.
- CloakBrowser for stealth headless browsing, and the acrawl Bridge extension for driving your own Chrome, Edge or Brave.
- axe-core for accessibility audits and Ratatui for the terminal UI.
- Several optional optimizations adapt ideas published by other open-source agents, including browser-use, Stagehand, crawl4ai, Skyvern, Spider and nanobrowser.
What acrawl sends, and where
Section titled “What acrawl sends, and where”acrawl has no telemetry and no account. It talks to:
- Your LLM provider, with the page content the agent needs, when you run the agent.
- The sites you ask it to visit.
- GitHub, to check for a newer release on startup and to download one when you run
acrawl update. - TypeSafe, only if you turn on the optional
semantic_prunesetting and give it a key.
The browser extension’s data handling is described in its privacy policy.
Get involved
Section titled “Get involved”- Report a bug or ask for a feature: open an issue.
- Contribute code: start with CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Report a security problem privately: see SECURITY.md.
acrawl is released under the MIT License.