head to head · open source
obscura vs Harper
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Harper has 17,365 stars, 794 forks, 896 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura leads on adoption by 74% (30,141 vs 17,365 stars). obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; Harper is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. obscura has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Harper 5%. Harper was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (rust), 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 | Harper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 794 |
| 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 Harper if
- You want the Harper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Harper 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…
read the full obscura overview →
About Harper
Harper Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition. Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong . Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round trip time of the network request makes revising your work all the more…
read the full Harper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is obscura or Harper more popular?
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars and Harper has 17,365. obscura has the larger community by that measure.
Are obscura and Harper free?
Both are open source. obscura is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Harper under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between obscura and Harper?
obscura is written in Rust and Harper in Rust. 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 Harper?
Choose obscura if you want the larger community (30,141 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Harper if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.