head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs local-deep-research
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. local-deep-research has 9,483 stars, 899 forks, 889 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 331% (40,882 vs 9,483 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 | ★ 41K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 899 |
| 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 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 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 local-deep-research
Local Deep Research AI powered research assistant for deep, agentic research Performs deep, agentic research using multiple LLMs and search engines with proper citations 🧪 First open source project — fully local on a single RTX 3090 (Qwen3.6 27B) — to report 95% SimpleQA (n=500) and 77% xbench DeepSearch (n=100) on local hardware. See the r/LocalLLaMA announcement and the benchmark dataset. ▶️ Watch Review by The Art Of The Terminal 🚀 What is Local Deep Research? AI research assistant you control. Run locally for privacy, use any LLM and build your own searchable knowledge base. You own your data and see…
read the full local-deep-research overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or local-deep-research more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and local-deep-research has 9,483. 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 (40,882 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.