head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs ferret
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars, 2,035 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ferret has 6,023 stars, 325 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 585% (41,263 vs 6,023 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; ferret is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, ferret 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 (browser-automation), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | ferret | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 325 |
| 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 ferret if
- You want the ferret 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 ferret 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 ferret
Ferret Try it! Docs CLI Test runner Web worker Explore Ferret v2 Ferret v2 is currently in alpha. You can try the new syntax in the playground and read more about the design behind the new runtime and language capabilities: Try Ferret v2 in the Playground On the Road to Ferret v2 Inside Ferret v2: The New Execution Model Inside Ferret v2: New Language Capabilities Notice: This branch contains the upcoming Ferret v2 . For the stable v1 release, please visit Ferret v1. What is it? Ferret is a declarative first, expression oriented embedded language and runtime for data automation. FQL combines querying…
read the full ferret 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 ferret more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars and ferret has 6,023. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and ferret free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and ferret under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and ferret?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and ferret 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 ferret?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,263 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose ferret if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.