head to head · open source
obscura vs Brave
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Brave has 24,079 stars, 3,263 forks, 10,752 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura leads on adoption by 25% (30,141 vs 24,079 stars). obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; Brave is written in various languages under MPL-2.0. obscura has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Brave 14%. Brave was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), 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
| obscura | Brave | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | — |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick obscura if
- You weight community size — 30K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Brave if
- You want the Brave feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- You evaluated both and Brave fits your workflow better
About obscura
Obscura The open source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping. Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust. Native rendering is here. No Chromium required. 🎉 Capture screenshots, screencast live pages, and export PDFs directly with Obscura. Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright. Why Obscura over headless Chrome? Obscura inspired Cloudflare Kitesurf’s first prototype Cloudflare began by…
read the full obscura overview →
About Brave
Brave Browser This repository is not needed for building the browser and only holds issues, releases and the wiki. The source code and contributions are at You can visit our website to get the latest stable release. Resources Issues: Bug reports and feature requests for the Brave Browser. Releases: Releases of Brave Browser hosted on GitHub. See Brave Release Schedule for more information. Wiki: Documentation for developers, administrators, and power users. User facing documentation is available at the Brave help center. Documentation and guides: Additional technical information, primarily for developers…
read the full Brave overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is obscura or Brave more popular?
obscura has 30,141 GitHub stars and Brave has 24,079. obscura has the larger community by that measure.
Are obscura and Brave free?
Both are open source. obscura is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Brave under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between obscura and Brave?
obscura is written in Rust and Brave in various languages. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, obscura or Brave?
Choose obscura if you want the larger community (30,141 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Brave if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.