head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs Scrapegraph-ai
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars, 1,684 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped today. Scrapegraph-ai has 31,140 stars, 3,141 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 14% (35,452 vs 31,140 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; Scrapegraph-ai is written in Python under MIT. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Scrapegraph-ai 10%. Lightpanda 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.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | Scrapegraph-ai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 31K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Zig | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 35K 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 Scrapegraph-ai if
- You want the Scrapegraph-ai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Scrapegraph-ai fits your workflow better
About Lightpanda
Lightpanda is a headless browser built from scratch in Zig, designed specifically for AI agents and automation tasks. It is not a fork of Chromium or WebKit but a new implementation targeting performance and efficiency in automated web interactions. It lives in the browser automation ecosystem, competing with tools like Puppeteer and Playwright that typically rely on Chromium based headless modes.
read the full Lightpanda overview →
About Scrapegraph-ai
ScrapeGraphAI is an open source Python library for web scraping that combines large language models with direct graph logic to build scraping pipelines. It lives in the Python ecosystem and is distributed under the MIT license, with the reference package published on PyPI as scrapegraphai . Rather than requiring a developer to hand write selectors for every page, the library accepts a natural language prompt describing the information to extract, alongside a source URL or local document, and returns structured results. It is designed around the idea expressed in its own tagline, "You Only Scrape Once," meaning th…
read the full Scrapegraph-ai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or Scrapegraph-ai more popular?
Lightpanda has 35,452 GitHub stars and Scrapegraph-ai has 31,140. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and Scrapegraph-ai free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Scrapegraph-ai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and Scrapegraph-ai?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and Scrapegraph-ai 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 Scrapegraph-ai?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (35,452 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Scrapegraph-ai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.