head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs MDMA
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. MDMA has 73 stars, 2 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 55,903% (40,882 vs 73 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; MDMA is written in TypeScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, MDMA 3%. 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 | MDMA | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 73 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 2 |
| 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 MDMA if
- You want the MDMA feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and MDMA 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 MDMA
MDMA Markdown Document with Mounted Applications Interactive documents from Markdown. Built for next gen apps 🌐 Website · 🚀 Live Demo · 📖 Docs · 💬 Discord · 🤗 Model Why MDMA? AI conversations today are plain text — the user reads a response and manually acts on it. MDMA changes that. When an LLM knows the MDMA spec, it can respond with interactive components (forms, tables, approval gates) instead of just text. The conversation becomes actionable: the user fills out a form, approves a step, or reviews structured data — all inline, with a predictable schema that your app already knows how to render and…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or MDMA more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and MDMA has 73. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and MDMA free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and MDMA under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and MDMA?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and MDMA in TypeScript. 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 MDMA?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose MDMA if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.