head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs invisible_playwright
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars, 2,035 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. invisible_playwright has 2,554 stars, 276 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,516% (41,263 vs 2,554 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; invisible_playwright is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, invisible_playwright 11%. invisible_playwright was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (browser-automation, 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
| Lightpanda | invisible_playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 276 |
| 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 invisible_playwright if
- You want the invisible_playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and invisible_playwright 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 invisible_playwright
Free antidetect browser stealth for Playwright: undetected Firefox fingerprint, headless or headed. Python web scraping and captcha bypass. Open source, and it passes every bot detection test. How it works Anti bots ask two questions, and reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile score the answers. invisible playwright answers yes to both. 1. Is this a real browser? Yes. It is Firefox, patched at the C++ source level. The browser fingerprint is set inside the engine, not injected into the page: navigator, screen, GPU/WebGL, canvas, fonts, audio, WebRTC, timezone, network. Headless or headed, the same values…
read the full invisible_playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or invisible_playwright more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars and invisible_playwright has 2,554. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and invisible_playwright free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and invisible_playwright under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and invisible_playwright?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and invisible_playwright in Python. 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 invisible_playwright?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,263 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose invisible_playwright if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.