head to head · open source
obscura vs fingerprintjs
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fingerprintjs has 28,675 stars, 2,641 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. obscura leads on adoption by 5% (30,141 vs 28,675 stars). obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; fingerprintjs is written in TypeScript under MIT. obscura has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, fingerprintjs 9%. obscura was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), 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
| obscura | fingerprintjs | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 29K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick obscura if
- You weight community size — 30K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick fingerprintjs if
- You want the fingerprintjs feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and fingerprintjs fits your workflow better
About obscura
Obscura The open source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping. Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust. Native rendering is here. No Chromium required. 🎉 Capture screenshots, screencast live pages, and export PDFs directly with Obscura. Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright. Why Obscura over headless Chrome? Obscura inspired Cloudflare Kitesurf’s first prototype Cloudflare began by…
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About fingerprintjs
FingerprintJS is an open source, client side, browser fingerprinting library that queries browser attributes and computes a hashed visitor identifier from them. Unlike cookies and local storage, a fingerprint stays the same in incognito/private mode and even when browser data is purged. FingerprintJS is available under the MIT license. Demo Visit to see your visitor identifier. Now, try visiting the same page in private/incognito mode and notice that the visitor identifier remains the same ! Installation npm CDN Run this code Resources 📕 API Reference ⚛️ Sample usage with React on the StackBlitz platform 🔑…
read the full fingerprintjs overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is obscura or fingerprintjs more popular?
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars and fingerprintjs has 28,675. obscura has the larger community by that measure.
Are obscura and fingerprintjs free?
Both are open source. obscura is licensed under Apache-2.0 and fingerprintjs under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between obscura and fingerprintjs?
obscura is written in Rust and fingerprintjs 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, obscura or fingerprintjs?
Choose obscura if you want the larger community (30,141 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fingerprintjs if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.