head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs lux
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. lux has 31,694 stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 12% (35,452 vs 31,694 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; lux is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, lux 10%. Lightpanda 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 | lux | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 32K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-03-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 lux if
- You want the lux feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lux 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 lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or lux more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and lux has 31,694. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and lux free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and lux under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and lux?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and lux 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 lux?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose lux if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.