head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs spider
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. spider has 2,724 stars, 302 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,201% (35,452 vs 2,724 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; spider is written in Rust under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, spider 11%. 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 | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 302 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 35K 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 spider if
- You want the spider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and spider 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 spider
Spider is a concurrency first web crawling and scraping engine written in Rust, licensed under MIT, and aimed at developers and data teams that need to collect web data with low latency, from a single script up to a distributed fleet.
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or spider more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and spider has 2,724. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and spider free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and spider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and spider?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and spider in Rust. 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 spider?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.