head to head · open source
Scrapling vs Lightpanda
Scrapling has 96,310 GitHub stars, 10,089 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda has 41,263 stars, 2,035 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Scrapling leads on adoption by 133% (96,310 vs 41,263 stars). Scrapling is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0. Scrapling has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Lightpanda 5%. 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
| Scrapling | Lightpanda | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 96K | ★ 41K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Zig |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Scrapling if
- You weight community size — 96K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Lightpanda if
- You want the Lightpanda feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Zig
- You evaluated both and Lightpanda fits your workflow better
About Scrapling
Effortless Web Scraping for the Modern Web Selection methods · Fetchers · Spiders · Proxy Rotation · CLI · MCP Scrapling is an adaptive Web Scraping framework that handles everything from a single request to a full scale crawl. Its parser learns from website changes and automatically relocates your elements when pages update. Its fetchers bypass anti bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile out of the box. And its spider framework lets you scale up to concurrent, multi session crawls with pause/resume, automatic proxy rotation, and a crawl speed that adapts to how fast each…
read the full Scrapling overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling or Lightpanda more popular?
Scrapling has 96,310 GitHub stars and Lightpanda has 41,263. Scrapling has the larger community by that measure.
Are Scrapling and Lightpanda free?
Both are open source. Scrapling is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and Lightpanda under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Scrapling and Lightpanda?
Scrapling is written in Python and Lightpanda in Zig. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Scrapling or Lightpanda?
Choose Scrapling if you want the larger community (96,310 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose Lightpanda if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.