head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs rod
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. rod has 7,107 stars, 485 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 399% (35,452 vs 7,107 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; rod is written in Go under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, rod 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cdp, headless), 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 | rod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 485 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 35K 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 rod if
- You want the rod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rod 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 rod
Rod is a high level driver for the Chrome DevTools Protocol, written in Go and released under the MIT license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is published as the module github.com/go rod/rod , with documentation hosted at go rod.github.io and an API reference on pkg.go.dev. The project is designed for web automation and scraping, and it deliberately spans two levels of use: senior developers can work with the low level packages and functions to customize the driver or build their own version of it, while the high level functions serve as examples that produce a default, ready to use build.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or rod more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and rod has 7,107. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and rod free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and rod under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and rod?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and rod 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 rod?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.