head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs anakin
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. anakin has 4,394 stars, 181 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 707% (35,452 vs 4,394 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 | ★ 35K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 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 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 anakin
AnakinScraper OSS is an open source, self hosted web scraping API written in Go that converts any website into LLM ready markdown or structured JSON, built for teams running RAG pipelines, AI agents and large scale data extraction.
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or anakin more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and anakin has 4,394. 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 (35,452 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.