head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs reader
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reader has 561 stars, 41 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 7,239% (41,174 vs 561 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, reader 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | reader | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 561 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 41 |
| 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 reader if
- You want the reader feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and reader 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 reader
Reader Open source web infrastructure for AI. Access the web without the complexity. Docs · Examples · Discord The Problem Building agents that need web access is frustrating. You piece together Puppeteer, add stealth plugins, fight Cloudflare, manage proxies and it still breaks in production. Because production grade web scraping isn't about rendering a page and converting HTML to markdown. It's about everything underneath: I built Reader , a production grade web scraping engine on top of Playwright, with stealth and anti detection built in from the ground up. The Solution Three primitives. That's it. All the…
read the full reader overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or reader more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and reader has 561. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and reader free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and reader under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and reader?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and reader in TypeScript. 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 reader?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose reader if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.