head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs cadence
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,535 stars, 931 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 329% (40,882 vs 9,535 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. 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.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 931 |
| 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 cadence if
- You want the cadence feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cadence 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 cadence
Cadence Cadence Workflow is an open source platform since 2017 for building and running scalable, fault tolerant, and long running workflows. This repository contains the core orchestration engine and tools including CLI, schema managment, benchmark and canary. Getting Started Cadence backend consists of multiple services, a database (Cassandra/MySQL/PostgreSQL) and optionally Kafka+Elasticsearch. As a user, you need a worker which contains your workflow implementation. Once you have Cadence backend and worker(s) running, you can trigger workflows by using SDKs or via CLI. 1. Start cadence backend components…
read the full cadence overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or cadence more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,535. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and cadence free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cadence under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and cadence?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and cadence 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 cadence?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.