head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs browser-control
Lightpanda has 41,640 GitHub stars, 2,070 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. browser-control has 3,157 stars, 210 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,219% (41,640 vs 3,157 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.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | browser-control | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-09 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 210 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 42K 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 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 browser-control
browser control A tiny, fast Rust CLI that drives a real browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol — built for coding agents. No LLM. No MCP requirement. No framework. Just compact, composable browser commands you can pipe from a shell. browser control exposes a browser as a small, debuggable pipe: page snapshots, stable element refs, raw CDP, a background event watcher, and shell runnable scripts. The coding agent stays the agent — browser control just gives it hands and eyes. Why browser control Shell native. Every capability is a subcommand that prints compact text or JSON. No SDK, no long running server to…
read the full browser-control overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or browser-control more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,640 GitHub stars and browser-control has 3,157. 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 (41,640 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.