head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs workflow-use
Lightpanda has 41,514 GitHub stars, 2,056 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. workflow-use has 4,247 stars, 356 forks, 61 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 877% (41,514 vs 4,247 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; workflow-use is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, workflow-use 8%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Lightpanda | workflow-use | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 4.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-07 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 356 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 42K 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 workflow-use if
- You want the workflow-use feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and workflow-use 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 workflow-use
Deterministic, Self Healing Workflows (RPA 2.0) ⚙️ Workflow Use is the easiest way to create and execute deterministic workflows with variables which fallback to Browser Use if a step fails. You just show the recorder the workflow, we automatically generate the workflow. ❗ This project is in very early development so we don't recommend using this in production. Lots of things will change and we don't have a release schedule yet. Originally, the project was born out of customer demand to make Browser Use more reliable and deterministic. 🚀 NEW: Generation Mode Automatically generate workflows from natural…
read the full workflow-use overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or workflow-use more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,514 GitHub stars and workflow-use has 4,247. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and workflow-use free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and workflow-use under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and workflow-use?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and workflow-use 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 workflow-use?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,514 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose workflow-use if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.