head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs katana
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. katana has 17,531 stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 102% (35,452 vs 17,531 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 | ★ 35K | ★ 18K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 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 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 katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or katana more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and katana has 17,531. 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 (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.