head to head · open source
lux vs stagehand
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. stagehand has 24,322 stars, 1,685 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 30% (31,686 vs 24,322 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. stagehand 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 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| lux | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 24K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 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 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 stagehand
Stagehand is the MIT licensed SDK for extracting data and interacting with any site on the web, available in TypeScript, Python, and Go, and aimed at developers building AI agents that need to drive a browser the way a person does rather than at engineers writing test suites.
read the full stagehand 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 stagehand more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and stagehand has 24,322. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and stagehand free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and stagehand under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and stagehand?
lux is written in Go 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, lux or stagehand?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.