head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs local-deep-research
Lightpanda has 35,409 GitHub stars, 1,680 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. local-deep-research has 9,099 stars, 821 forks, 889 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 289% (35,409 vs 9,099 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; local-deep-research is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, local-deep-research 9%. local-deep-research 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 | local-deep-research | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 9.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 821 |
| 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 local-deep-research if
- You want the local-deep-research feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and local-deep-research 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 local-deep-research
Local Deep Research is an MIT licensed, Python based AI research assistant that performs deep, agentic research with proper citations across any local or cloud LLM and more than ten search engines, built for researchers, developers, and privacy conscious self hosters who want both the workload and the data to stay on hardware they control.
read the full local-deep-research overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or local-deep-research more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,409 GitHub stars and local-deep-research has 9,099. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and local-deep-research free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and local-deep-research under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and local-deep-research?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and local-deep-research 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 local-deep-research?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,409 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose local-deep-research if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.