What is Anakin used for?

Anakin is a self-hostable web scraping API in Go that turns websites into clean Markdown or structured JSON, with an anti-detect browser and automatic proxy selection. It is a good fit for feeding web content into RAG pipelines and data extraction for AI agents.

Is Anakin open source?

Yes. Anakin is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Anakin-Inc/anakin and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Anakin is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Anakin?

Yes. Anakin can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Anakin an alternative to?

Anakin is an open-source alternative to Apify and Diffbot. Other open-source alternatives to Apify include Maxun and Skyvern.

Is Anakin actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Anakin was on 18 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.1.1, published on 23 March 2026. The project has 4.5k stars on GitHub.

Anakin: open-source alternative to Apify, Diffbot

About Anakin

AnakinScraper OSS is an open-source web scraping API aimed at AI use cases. It converts web pages into markdown ready for language models or into structured data, and it can be self-hosted with a single command with no cloud dependencies. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

The README highlights an anti-detect browser based on Camoufox, a Firefox build, smart proxy selection using Thompson Sampling, a handler chain that falls back from plain HTTP to a browser and then an API, and structured JSON extraction using Gemini. It can start with go run without a database and ships as one small Go binary, in contrast to the Node.js or Python based tools it compares itself against, including Firecrawl, Crawlee, and Scrapy.

It is meant to power RAG pipelines, AI agents, and data extraction at scale. Anyone scraping should check the target site's terms and applicable law. It suits developers who want a private, self-run alternative to hosted scraping APIs.

Key features

Websites to markdown or structured JSON
Anti-detect browser based on Camoufox
Smart proxy selection
Handler chain from HTTP to browser to API
Single Go binary, no database required
One-command self-hosting

Good fit for

→Feeding web content into RAG pipelines
→Data extraction for AI agents

Built with: Go
Tags: web-scraping; crawler; markdown; ai; self-hosted; go; proxy; data-extraction

Anakin: questions and answers

What is Anakin used for?: Anakin is a self-hostable web scraping API in Go that turns websites into clean Markdown or structured JSON, with an anti-detect browser and automatic proxy selection. It is a good fit for feeding web content into RAG pipelines and data extraction for AI agents.
Is Anakin open source?: Yes. Anakin is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Anakin-Inc/anakin and is written mainly in Go.
Is Anakin free?: Yes. Anakin is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Anakin?: Yes. Anakin can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Anakin an alternative to?: Anakin is an open-source alternative to Apify and Diffbot. Other open-source alternatives to Apify include Maxun and Skyvern.
Is Anakin actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Anakin was on 18 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.1.1, published on 23 March 2026. The project has 4.5k stars on GitHub.