head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs crawlee
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee has 25,841 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 37% (35,452 vs 25,841 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (headless, playwright, puppeteer), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 35K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Zig
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better
About Lightpanda
Lightpanda is a headless browser built from scratch in Zig, designed specifically for AI agents and automation tasks. It is not a fork of Chromium or WebKit but a new implementation targeting performance and efficiency in automated web interactions. It lives in the browser automation ecosystem, competing with tools like Puppeteer and Playwright that typically rely on Chromium based headless modes.
read the full Lightpanda overview →
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or crawlee more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,841. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and crawlee free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and crawlee?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and crawlee in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Lightpanda or crawlee?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.