head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs reverse-api-engineer
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reverse-api-engineer has 2,541 stars, 266 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,520% (41,174 vs 2,541 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; reverse-api-engineer is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, reverse-api-engineer 10%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | reverse-api-engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 266 |
| 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 reverse-api-engineer if
- You want the reverse-api-engineer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and reverse-api-engineer 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 reverse-api-engineer
Reverse API Engineer Turn websites into APIs. Browse (or let an agent browse), and get a clean, typed client for the endpoints the site actually uses. Agent mode Manual mode How it works 1. You give it a website and a goal ("fetch all Apple jobs"). 2. A browser visits the site, either driven by you or by an AI agent. 3. Network traffic is captured to a HAR file. 4. Your configured model reads the traffic and writes a working API client in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Java, C , PHP, Ruby, or C. No more manually opening DevTools, copying cURL commands, and gluing together a client. Install Agent mode (the…
read the full reverse-api-engineer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or reverse-api-engineer more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and reverse-api-engineer has 2,541. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and reverse-api-engineer free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and reverse-api-engineer under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and reverse-api-engineer?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and reverse-api-engineer in Python. 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 reverse-api-engineer?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose reverse-api-engineer if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.