head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs pydoll
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pydoll has 7,133 stars, 413 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 27 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 477% (41,174 vs 7,133 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, pydoll 6%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (cdp, headless, playwright, 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 | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 413 |
| 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 pydoll if
- You want the pydoll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and pydoll 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 pydoll
The stealth first browser automation library for Python. No WebDriver, no navigator.webdriver flag, humanized clicks and typing. = 3.10" Documentation · Getting Started · Features · Support You have probably watched a scraper work on your machine, then hit a wall of captchas and Cloudflare challenges the moment it ran for real. That wall is what Pydoll is built around. It drives Chrome directly over the DevTools Protocol, so there is no WebDriver binary and no navigator.webdriver flag to give you away, and it clicks, types, and scrolls like a real person. That is often enough to get past the…
read the full pydoll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or pydoll more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,133. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and pydoll free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pydoll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and pydoll?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and pydoll in HTML. 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 pydoll?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.