head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs OpenSERP
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenSERP has 1,544 stars, 184 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 2,548% (40,882 vs 1,544 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; OpenSERP is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, OpenSERP 12%. 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 | OpenSERP | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 184 |
| 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 OpenSERP if
- You want the OpenSERP feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and OpenSERP 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 OpenSERP
OpenSERP OpenSERP is a free, open source SERP API and CLI for Google, Yandex, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. No API keys, no per search billing: one command gives you live, structured search results on localhost including engines the paid APIs don't cover. Use it as a search tool for LLMs and agents, or as a backend for SEO rank tracking. If you'd rather not run infrastructure, there is a hosted version with the same API. Features Dedicated endpoints for six engines, same JSON schema across all of them Megasearch one query across several engines at once, merged and deduped URL extraction search results…
read the full OpenSERP overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or OpenSERP more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and OpenSERP has 1,544. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and OpenSERP free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and OpenSERP under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and OpenSERP?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and OpenSERP 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 OpenSERP?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose OpenSERP if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.