head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs colly
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. colly has 25,527 stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 39% (35,452 vs 25,527 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, colly 7%. 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 | colly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 35K 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 colly if
- You want the colly 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 colly 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 colly
Colly is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or colly more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and colly has 25,527. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and colly free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and colly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and colly?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and colly 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 colly?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.