head to head · open source
lux vs invisible_playwright
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. invisible_playwright has 2,839 stars, 284 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped today. lux leads on adoption by 1,016% (31,694 vs 2,839 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; invisible_playwright is written in Python under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, invisible_playwright 10%. invisible_playwright 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| lux | invisible_playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 284 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lux if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick invisible_playwright if
- You want the invisible_playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and invisible_playwright fits your workflow better
About lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
About invisible_playwright
invisible playwright is a free, MIT licensed Python package that makes Playwright's headless Firefox present as a real browser and behave like a real user, built for developers whose scrapers must clear bot detection such as reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile.
read the full invisible_playwright 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 lux or invisible_playwright more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and invisible_playwright has 2,839. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and invisible_playwright free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and invisible_playwright under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and invisible_playwright?
lux is written in Go and invisible_playwright 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, lux or invisible_playwright?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose invisible_playwright if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.