head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs LiveKit
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. LiveKit has 21,994 stars, 2,526 forks, 189 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 86% (40,882 vs 21,994 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; LiveKit is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, LiveKit 11%. LiveKit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | LiveKit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 22K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 LiveKit if
- You want the LiveKit 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 LiveKit 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 LiveKit
LiveKit: Realtime infrastructure for voice, video, and AI agents LiveKit is an open source platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. This repository is the LiveKit server: a scalable, distributed WebRTC SFU that moves realtime audio, video, and data between people, devices, and AI models. The SDKs, agents frameworks, and companion services are linked in the table at the bottom of this page. LiveKit's server is written in Go, using the awesome Pion WebRTC implementation. [!IMPORTANT] If you're building Voice AI, LiveKit Agents is the SDK for code first realtime voice agents. STT, LLM, TTS, turn…
read the full LiveKit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or LiveKit more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and LiveKit has 21,994. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and LiveKit free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and LiveKit under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and LiveKit?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and LiveKit 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 LiveKit?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose LiveKit if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.