head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs anakin
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. anakin has 3,879 stars, 164 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 961% (41,174 vs 3,879 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; anakin is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, anakin 4%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (playwright), 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 | anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 164 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 41K 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 anakin if
- You want the anakin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and anakin fits your workflow better
About Lightpanda
Lightpanda Browser The headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation. Not a Chromium fork. Not a WebKit patch. A new browser, written in Zig.   Benchmarks Requesting 933 real web pages over the network on a AWS EC2 m5.large instance. See benchmark details. Quick start Install Package Managers Latest nightly from Homebrew: Latest nightly from Arch Linux User Repository: Download from the nightly builds You can download the last binary from the nightly builds for Linux and MacOS for both x86 64 and aarch64. For Linux Verify the binary before running anything: Linux aarch64 is also available…
read the full Lightpanda overview →
About anakin
AnakinScraper OSS The open source web scraping API for AI. Turn any website into LLM ready markdown or structured data. Self host with a single command. No cloud dependencies. Powers RAG pipelines, AI agents, and data extraction at scale. Why AnakinScraper? Features Handler chain with fallback — HTTP fetch → anti detect browser → external API. Each handler tries in order; if one fails, the next picks up automatically. Most pages resolve on the free local HTTP handler — paid APIs are only called for the 5% that actually need them. Docs → Custom API handlers — plug in any third party scraping service as a chain…
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or anakin more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and anakin has 3,879. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and anakin free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and anakin under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and anakin?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and anakin in Go. 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 anakin?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose anakin if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.