Apache Nutch is an open-source web crawler released under the Apache License 2.0. It collects web content at scale and can be extended with plug-ins, for example to parse documents with Apache Tika and to index results in Apache Solr or Elasticsearch. Nutch is meant for organisations that want to build their own search index or dataset. The most recent release dates from September 2026.
The Apache Software Foundation maintains Nutch; the foundation is a US non-profit organisation. Nutch is a downloadable project rather than a hosted service: the crawl runs on the infrastructure of the organisation that operates it, and the collected data stays there. Because the source code is public and freely available, a European organisation can deploy the software without licence fees and without depending on a US service provider. It is an open alternative to commercial web-crawling and data-collection services sold as subscriptions.