head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs pinchtab
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinchtab has 10,550 stars, 791 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 290% (41,174 vs 10,550 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; pinchtab is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, pinchtab 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (browser-automation, cdp), 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 | pinchtab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 11K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 791 |
| 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 pinchtab if
- You want the pinchtab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pinchtab 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 pinchtab
PinchTab Browser control for AI agents Small Go binary • HTTP API • Token efficient What is PinchTab? PinchTab is a standalone HTTP server that gives AI agents direct control over Chrome. For day to day local use, the server is typically installed as a user level daemon, allowing agent tools to reuse the same browser control plane running in the background. This installs the control plane server and starts a default headless Chrome instance, ready to accept requests from agents or manual API calls. PinchTab is designed first for local, single user control on a machine you manage. Remote and distributed layouts…
read the full pinchtab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or pinchtab more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and pinchtab has 10,550. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and pinchtab free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pinchtab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and pinchtab?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and pinchtab 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 pinchtab?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pinchtab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.