# Lightpanda

> AGPL-3.0 headless browser written in Zig for agents and scraping

**Category:** AI Agents  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://lightpanda.io  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser  
**Added:** 2026-10-20

---

## The Hook

Lightpanda is a headless browser written from scratch in Zig for AI agents and scraping. It speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), so Puppeteer- and Playwright-style clients can drive it, and it is much lighter than headless Chrome.

## What's Good

AGPL-3.0 (lightpanda-io/browser), release 1.0.1 (2026-10-15), commit on 2026-10-20. Useful when you run many headless sessions and Chrome's memory and startup cost is the bottleneck.

## The Catch

AGPL-3.0, and it is not full Chrome: pages that rely on Web APIs it has not implemented yet will break, so test your target sites first. ★~36.8k in about 193 weeks (~190 a week) with 99 watchers: judge it on the engine, not the star count.

## Verdict

A real, lightweight CDP browser for agent fleets; keep Chrome around for the sites it cannot render.