head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs stealth-browser-mcp
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stealth-browser-mcp has 3,331 stars, 411 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 1,136% (41,174 vs 3,331 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; stealth-browser-mcp is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, stealth-browser-mcp 12%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser-automation), 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 | stealth-browser-mcp | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 411 |
| 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 stealth-browser-mcp if
- You want the stealth-browser-mcp feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and stealth-browser-mcp 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 stealth-browser-mcp
Stealth Browser MCP Stealth browser automation for MCP compatible AI agents. Navigate Cloudflare challenges, anti bot checks, and login walls with real Chrome family browser instances powered by nodriver, Chrome DevTools Protocol, and FastMCP. Sponsors NodeMaven — The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scraping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? ZIP targeting 99.9% uptime IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score RapidProxy powers scraping and automation with 90M+ residential IPs across 200+ countries, supporting rotation, geo targeting, and high concurrency to improve…
read the full stealth-browser-mcp overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or stealth-browser-mcp more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and stealth-browser-mcp has 3,331. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and stealth-browser-mcp free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and stealth-browser-mcp under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and stealth-browser-mcp?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and stealth-browser-mcp 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 stealth-browser-mcp?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose stealth-browser-mcp if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.