head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs parsera
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. parsera has 1,357 stars, 78 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 2,513% (35,452 vs 1,357 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 | ★ 35K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2025-12-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 78 |
| 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 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 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 parsera
Parsera lightweight Python library scraping websites with LLMs. It sits in Python web scraping and data extraction ecosystem. Listing puts it under Data & Analytics / Data Extraction & Web Scraping. License is GPL 2.0. Project page lists 1356 stars, 78 forks, 4 open issues, 2 year age, and last push date 2025 12 17T10:58:19Z. Topics connect it to AI scraping, Playwright, open source data extraction.
read the full parsera overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or parsera more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and parsera has 1,357. 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 (35,452 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.