head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs scrapy-playwright
Lightpanda has 36,566 GitHub stars, 1,753 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy-playwright has 1,458 stars, 163 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 2,408% (36,566 vs 1,458 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; scrapy-playwright is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, scrapy-playwright 11%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | scrapy-playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 163 |
| 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 scrapy-playwright if
- You want the scrapy-playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapy-playwright 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 scrapy-playwright
scrapy playwright is a Scrapy download handler that performs requests using Playwright for Python, so existing Scrapy crawlers can render pages that require JavaScript — built for Python developers who want browser grade rendering inside a normal Scrapy workflow.
read the full scrapy-playwright overview →
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 scrapy-playwright more popular?
Lightpanda has 36,566 GitHub stars and scrapy-playwright has 1,458. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and scrapy-playwright free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and scrapy-playwright under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and scrapy-playwright?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and scrapy-playwright 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 scrapy-playwright?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (36,566 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose scrapy-playwright if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.