head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs social-media-research-skills
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars, 1,999 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. social-media-research-skills has 5,319 stars, 111 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 669% (40,882 vs 5,319 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; social-media-research-skills is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, social-media-research-skills 2%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | social-media-research-skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 111 |
| 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 social-media-research-skills if
- You want the social-media-research-skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and social-media-research-skills 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 social-media-research-skills
Social Media Research Skills for AI Agents Practical AI agent skills for social media research, powered by ScrapeCreators. These skills help agents find outlier posts, mine comments, summarize transcripts, tear down competitors, analyze ad libraries, and turn public social data into useful business artifacts. This is not just endpoint routing. The goal is to give your AI agent complete research workflows it can run across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Pinterest, Rumble, ad libraries, and more. Install Works with Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, GitHub…
read the full social-media-research-skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or social-media-research-skills more popular?
Lightpanda has 40,882 GitHub stars and social-media-research-skills has 5,319. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and social-media-research-skills free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and social-media-research-skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and social-media-research-skills?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and social-media-research-skills 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 social-media-research-skills?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (40,882 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose social-media-research-skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.