head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs rod
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rod has 7,142 stars, 489 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 477% (41,174 vs 7,142 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | rod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 489 |
| 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 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 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 rod
Overview [ ][discord room] Documentation API reference FAQ Rod is a high level driver directly based on DevTools Protocol. It's designed for web automation and scraping for both high level and low level use, senior developers can use the low level packages and functions to easily customize or build up their own version of Rod, the high level functions are just examples to build a default version of Rod. 中文 API 文档 Features Chained context design, intuitive to timeout or cancel the long running task Auto wait elements to be ready Debugging friendly, auto input tracing, remote monitoring headless browser Thread…
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or rod more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and rod has 7,142. 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 (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.