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Directory / Agent infrastructure / Lightpanda

L

Lightpanda

Open-source headless browser built from scratch in Zig for automation, crawling and AI agents: runs JavaScript with no graphical rendering, plugs into Puppeteer and Playwright over CDP, and includes MCP and agent modes. Self-host it or use Lightpanda Cloud.

Visit lightpanda.io ↗
Our rating
★ 4.3 / 5 preliminary
Pricing
Freemium · from $19/mo
Category
Agent infrastructure
For
Builder
Last updated
Nov 2, 2026

💲 Open-source browser (AGPL-3.0) is free to self-host. Cloud: Explorer $0 (10 browser hours/mo, 5 concurrent sessions); Builder $19/mo (300 hours, then $0.08/hr, 30 concurrent sessions); Enterprise custom. Source: lightpanda.io (checked Nov 2, 2026).

Pros & cons

👍 Pros

  • Much lighter than headless Chrome: 9x faster and 16x less memory in Lightpanda's benchmark
  • Works with existing Puppeteer/Playwright scripts (swap launch for connect)
  • Built-in MCP and agent modes; 1.0 is out with 1.7M passing WPT subtests

👎 Cons

  • Not a full browser engine, so some sites may still break; Chrome fallback offered for those
  • AGPL license may matter for commercial self-hosting
  • Benchmarks are vendor-run

Latest release

Oct 23, 2026

Lightpanda 1.0.2

Follow-up to the 1.0 release: per-page session history, a new page_error log scope, and stricter --block-private-networks handling. 1.0 (Oct 2) shipped a usable classic WebDriver; the repo is trending on GitHub this week. Source ↗

Ranked in

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