head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs stagehand
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stagehand has 25,934 stars, 1,808 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 59% (41,174 vs 25,934 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (browser-automation, cdp, 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.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 1.8K |
| 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 stagehand if
- You want the stagehand feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and stagehand 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 stagehand
Stagehand is the SDK to extract data and interact with any site on the web. Playwright was built for testing. Stagehand is built for agents, in TypeScript, Python, and Go. Docs · Quickstart · ⭐ Star this repo AI that uses the browser like humans. Sign in once, keep the session, and pull structured data out the other side. Python Go Install Python Go Local runs need Chrome installed. Full setup: Quickstart. Why Stagehand Token efficiency Hybrid accessibilit
read the full stagehand overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or stagehand more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and stagehand has 25,934. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and stagehand free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and stagehand under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and stagehand?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and stagehand in TypeScript. 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 stagehand?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.