head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs cenit
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cenit has 509 stars, 134 forks, 24 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 7,932% (40,882 vs 509 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; cenit is written in Ruby under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, cenit 26%. 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 | cenit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 509 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 134 |
| 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 cenit if
- You want the cenit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and cenit 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 cenit
Cenit Cenit is an open source integration platform as a service (iPaaS). It helps teams design integrations, orchestrate data flows, expose APIs, and manage data pipelines across external systems. Cloud: web.cenit.io Product documentation: docs.cenit.io Table of contents What you can build Architecture and stack Project status Quick start (local Docker Compose) Configuration Testing and quality checks Git hooks (pre push E2E) Troubleshooting Contributing Security Code of conduct License What you can build Backendless data APIs from JSON Schema based Data Types. Integration flows for routing, orchestration, and…
read the full cenit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or cenit more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and cenit has 509. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and cenit free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cenit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and cenit?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and cenit in Ruby. 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 cenit?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cenit if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.