head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs oc
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. oc has 507 stars, 31 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 6,893% (35,452 vs 507 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; oc is written in JavaScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, oc 6%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser-automation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | oc | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 507 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 31 |
| 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 oc if
- You want the oc feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and oc 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 oc
oc is an MIT licensed command line tool that turns a mostly static website into a compact, numbered terminal view for AI agents, so agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity can read a page in hundreds of tokens instead of tens of thousands.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or oc more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and oc has 507. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and oc free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and oc under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and oc?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and oc in JavaScript. 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 oc?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose oc if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.