head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs browser-control
Lightpanda has 35,559 GitHub stars, 1,690 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. browser-control has 3,146 stars, 209 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 29 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,030% (35,559 vs 3,146 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; browser-control is written in Rust under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, browser-control 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser-automation), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | browser-control | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-25 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 209 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 36K 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 browser-control if
- You want the browser-control feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and browser-control 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 browser-control
browser control is a tiny, fast Rust command line tool that drives a real Chrome or Chromium browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, built for coding agents that need to browse, inspect, and act on web pages by running ordinary shell commands.
read the full browser-control overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or browser-control more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,559 GitHub stars and browser-control has 3,146. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and browser-control free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and browser-control under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and browser-control?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and browser-control 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, Lightpanda or browser-control?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,559 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose browser-control if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.