head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs rebrowser-patches
Lightpanda has 36,760 GitHub stars, 1,772 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. rebrowser-patches has 1,443 stars, 85 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 2,447% (36,760 vs 1,443 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; rebrowser-patches is written in JavaScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, rebrowser-patches 6%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | rebrowser-patches | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 85 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 37K 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 rebrowser-patches if
- You want the rebrowser-patches feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and rebrowser-patches 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 rebrowser-patches
🪄 Patches for undetectable browser automation This repo contains patches to enhance popular web automation libraries. Specifically, it targets the puppeteer and playwright packages. Some aspects of automation libraries or browser behavior cannot be adjusted through settings or command line switches. Therefore, we fix these issues by patching the library's source code. While this approach is fragile and may break as the libraries' source code changes over time, the goal is to maintain this repo with community help to keep the patches up to date. Do I really need any patches? Out of the box Puppeteer and…
read the full rebrowser-patches overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or rebrowser-patches more popular?
Lightpanda has 36,760 GitHub stars and rebrowser-patches has 1,443. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and rebrowser-patches free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and rebrowser-patches under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and rebrowser-patches?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and rebrowser-patches in JavaScript. 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 rebrowser-patches?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (36,760 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rebrowser-patches if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.