head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs page-agent
Lightpanda has 35,472 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. page-agent has 29,140 stars, 2,616 forks, 94 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 22% (35,472 vs 29,140 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; page-agent is written in TypeScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, page-agent 9%. 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 | page-agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 29K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 page-agent if
- You want the page-agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and page-agent 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 page-agent
Page Agent is an MIT licensed TypeScript library from Alibaba that embeds a natural language GUI agent directly inside a web page, aimed at product teams, accessibility engineers, and automation developers who want to drive their own interfaces with plain language instructions instead of hand written scripts.
read the full page-agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or page-agent more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,472 GitHub stars and page-agent has 29,140. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and page-agent free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and page-agent under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and page-agent?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and page-agent 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 page-agent?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,472 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose page-agent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.