head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs parsera
Lightpanda has 41,313 GitHub stars, 2,039 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parsera has 1,370 stars, 80 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 2,916% (41,313 vs 1,370 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; parsera is written in Python under GPL-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, parsera 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 (playwright), 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 | parsera | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2025-12-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 80 |
| 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 parsera if
- You want the parsera feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and parsera 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 parsera
📦 Parsera Lightweight Python library for scraping websites with LLMs. You can test it on Parsera website. Why Parsera? Because it's simple and lightweight. With interface as simple as: Table of Contents Installation Documentation Basic usage Running with Jupyter Notebook Running with CLI Running in Docker Installation Documentation Check out documentation to learn more about other features, like running custom models and playwright scripts. Basic usage First, set up PARSERA API KEY env variable (If you want to run custom LLM see Custom Models). You can do this from python with: Next, you can run a basic…
read the full parsera overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or parsera more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,313 GitHub stars and parsera has 1,370. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and parsera free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and parsera under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and parsera?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and parsera in Python. 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 parsera?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,313 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose parsera if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.