head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs ferret
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. ferret has 6,013 stars, 324 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 490% (35,452 vs 6,013 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 | ★ 35K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 324 |
| 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 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 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 ferret
Ferret is a declarative data automation language and embeddable Go runtime for structured extraction workflows, built for Go developers who need to query, transform, and synchronize structured data across browsers, APIs, databases, and documents from inside their own applications.
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 35,452 GitHub stars and ferret has 6,013. 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 (35,452 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.