head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs spider
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars, 2,035 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spider has 2,824 stars, 323 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,361% (41,263 vs 2,824 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 | ★ 41K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 323 |
| 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 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 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 spider
Spider The fastest web crawler and scraper for Rust. spider.cloud · Guides · Docs · Examples · Discord Spider is a concurrency first crawling engine written in Rust. It streams pages as they arrive, renders JavaScript only on pages that need it, and scales from a single script to a distributed fleet without changing your code. The same engine runs Spider Cloud, so you can prototype locally and move to managed infrastructure with one config change. Start in the cloud The hardest part of crawling at scale isn't the code. It's the proxies, headless browsers, and constant anti bot churn. Spider Cloud runs all of…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or spider more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,263 GitHub stars and spider has 2,824. 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 (41,263 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.