head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs Skyvern
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Skyvern has 23,336 stars, 2,233 forks, 234 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 75% (40,882 vs 23,336 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; Skyvern is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Skyvern 10%. Skyvern was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (browser, browser-automation, playwright, puppeteer), 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 | Skyvern | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 23K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 Skyvern if
- You want the Skyvern feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Skyvern 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 Skyvern
🐉 Automate Browser based workflows using LLMs and Computer Vision 🐉 Skyvern automates browser based workflows using LLMs and computer vision. It provides a Playwright compatible SDK that adds AI functionality on top of playwright, as well as a no code workflow builder to help both technical and non technical users automate manual workflows on any website, replacing brittle or unreliable automation solutions. Traditional approaches to browser automations required writing custom scripts for websites, often relying on DOM parsing and XPath based interactions which would break whenever the website layouts changed…
read the full Skyvern overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or Skyvern more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and Skyvern has 23,336. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and Skyvern free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Skyvern under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and Skyvern?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and Skyvern 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 Skyvern?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Skyvern if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.