head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs PHPScraper
Lightpanda has 41,313 GitHub stars, 2,039 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 74 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 6,926% (41,313 vs 588 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; PHPScraper is written in PHP under GPL-3.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, PHPScraper 13%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (puppeteer), 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 | PHPScraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 588 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Zig | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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 PHPScraper if
- You want the PHPScraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and PHPScraper 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 PHPScraper
For full documentation, visit phpscraper.de . PHPScraper is a versatile web utility for PHP. Its primary objective is to streamline the process of extracting information from websites, allowing you to focus on accomplishing tasks without getting caught up in the complexities of selectors, data structure preparation, and conversion. Under the hood, it uses BrowserKit (formerly Goutte) to access the web League/URI to process URLs donatello za/rake php plus to extract and analyze keywords See composer.json for more details. :timer clock: PHPScraper in 5 Minutes explained Here are a few impressions of the way the…
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or PHPScraper more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,313 GitHub stars and PHPScraper has 588. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and PHPScraper free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and PHPScraper under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and PHPScraper?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and PHPScraper in PHP. 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 PHPScraper?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,313 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose PHPScraper if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.