head to head · open source
Ladybird vs luakit
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars, 3,194 forks, 535 open issues and last shipped yesterday. luakit has 2,322 stars, 256 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Ladybird leads on adoption by 2,777% (66,807 vs 2,322 stars). Ladybird is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; luakit is written in Lua under GPL-3.0. Ladybird has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, luakit 11%. Ladybird was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Ladybird | luakit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 256 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ladybird if
- You weight community size — 67K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick luakit if
- You want the luakit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and luakit fits your workflow better
About Ladybird
Ladybird Ladybird is a truly independent web browser, using a novel engine based on web standards. [!IMPORTANT] Ladybird is in a pre alpha state, and only suitable for use by developers Features We aim to build a complete, usable browser for the modern web. Ladybird uses a multi process architecture with a main UI process, several WebContent renderer processes, an ImageDecoder process, and a RequestServer process. Image decoding and network connections are done out of process to be more robust against malicious content. Each tab has its own renderer process, which is sandboxed from the rest of the system. At the…
read the full Ladybird overview →
About luakit
Luakit luakit is a fast, light and simple to use micro browser framework extensible by Lua using the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. Don't Panic! You don't have to be a developer to use luakit on a daily basis. If you are familiar with quitebrowser, vim browser, jumanji or extensions like Vimium or cVim etc, you will find luakit behaves similarly out of the box. Requirements GTK+ 3 Lua 5.1 or LuaJIT 2 lfs (lua file system) webkit2gtk sqlite3 gstreamer (for video playback) lua socket (for gopher support) Installing Luakit is available on most Linux Distributions and BSD system via their package…
read the full luakit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ladybird or luakit more popular?
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars and luakit has 2,322. Ladybird has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ladybird and luakit free?
Both are open source. Ladybird is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and luakit under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ladybird and luakit?
Ladybird is written in C++ and luakit in Lua. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ladybird or luakit?
Choose Ladybird if you want the larger community (66,807 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose luakit if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.