head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs katana
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars, 2,035 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. katana has 17,797 stars, 1,215 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 132% (41,263 vs 17,797 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; katana is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (headless), 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 | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 18K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana 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 katana
A next generation crawling and spidering framework Features • Installation • Usage • Scope • Config • Filters • Join Discord Features Fast And fully configurable web crawling Standard and Headless mode JavaScript parsing / crawling Customizable automatic form filling Scope control Preconfigured field / Regex Knowledge base ML page type / form classification (auto downloaded model) Customizable output Preconfigured fields INPUT STDIN , URL and LIST OUTPUT STDOUT , FILE and JSON Installation katana requires Go 1.26+ to install successfully. If you encounter any installation issues, we recommend trying with the…
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or katana more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars and katana has 17,797. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and katana free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and katana?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and katana 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 katana?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,263 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.