head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs button-card
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. button-card has 2,523 stars, 285 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,520% (40,882 vs 2,523 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; button-card is written in TypeScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, button-card 11%. Lightpanda 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | button-card | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 285 |
| 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 button-card if
- You want the button-card feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and button-card 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 button-card
Button Card by @RomRider [![Stable][releases shield]][releases] [![Beta][releases dev shield]][releases dev] [![HACS Badge][hacs badge]][hacs link] ![Project Maintenance][maintenance shield] ![Downloads][downloads] [![GitHub Activity][commits shield]][commits] [![License][license shield]](LICENSE.md) [![Discord][discord shield]][discord] [![Community Forum][forum shield]][forum] [commits shield]: [commits]: [discord]: [discord shield]: [forum shield]: [forum]: [license shield]: [maintenance shield]: [releases shield]: [releases]: [releases dev shield]: [releases dev]: [hacs badge]: [downloads]: [hacs link]…
read the full button-card 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 button-card more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and button-card has 2,523. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and button-card free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and button-card under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and button-card?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and button-card in TypeScript. 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 button-card?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose button-card if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.