head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs playwright-go
Lightpanda has 35,531 GitHub stars, 1,688 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. playwright-go has 3,510 stars, 246 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 912% (35,531 vs 3,510 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; playwright-go is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, playwright-go 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (browser-automation, headless, 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 | playwright-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 246 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 36K 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 playwright-go if
- You want the playwright-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and playwright-go 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 playwright-go
Playwright for Go is a browser automation library, distributed as the Go module github.com/mxschmitt/playwright go under the MIT licence, that drives Chromium, Firefox and WebKit through a single API and is aimed at Go developers who need programmatic control of real browsers.
read the full playwright-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or playwright-go more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,531 GitHub stars and playwright-go has 3,510. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and playwright-go free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and playwright-go under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and playwright-go?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and playwright-go 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 playwright-go?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,531 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose playwright-go if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.