head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs Lightpanda
Crawl4AI has 86,861 GitHub stars, 9,046 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Lightpanda has 41,174 stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 111% (86,861 vs 41,174 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Lightpanda 5%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (playwright), 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
| Crawl4AI | Lightpanda | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 41K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Zig |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Lightpanda if
- You want the Lightpanda feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Zig
- You evaluated both and Lightpanda fits your workflow better
About Crawl4AI
🚀🤖 Crawl4AI: Open source LLM Friendly Web Crawler & Scraper. 🚀 Crawl4AI Cloud API — Closed Beta (Launching Soon) Reliable, large scale web extraction, now built to be drastically more cost effective than any of the existing solutions. 👉 Apply here for early access We’ll be onboarding in phases and working closely with early users. Limited slots. Crawl4AI turns the web into clean, LLM ready Markdown for RAG, agents, and data pipelines. Fast, controllable, battle tested by a 50k+ star community. ✨ Check out latest update v0.9.3 ✨ New in v0.9.3 : Security release. Closes five coordinated disclosure advisories…
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or Lightpanda more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,861 GitHub stars and Lightpanda has 41,174. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and Lightpanda free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Lightpanda under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and Lightpanda?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and Lightpanda in Zig. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Crawl4AI or Lightpanda?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,861 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Lightpanda if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.