# lightpanda-io/browser

Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation

Repository: https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/browser
Homepage: https://lightpanda.io
Language: Zig
License: AGPL-3.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: browser, cdp, headless, playwright, puppeteer, zig, browser-automation, lightpanda
Last push: 2026-08-27T00:33:20+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 97/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 98, longevity 93
- inputs: {"age_days": 1303, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 17, "gap_med": 11.0, "n_releases_24m": 19}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 34269, forks 1613 (observed 2026-08-28T04:12:00.475884+00:00)

## What it is
Lightpanda is a headless web browser built from scratch in Zig, designed for AI agents, automation, and web scraping rather than human rendering. It exposes a CDP-compatible server that works with Playwright, Puppeteer, and chromedp, and offers dramatically lower memory use and faster execution than headless Chrome.

## Use cases
- scrape web pages at scale with low memory footprint
- drive a browser with Playwright or Puppeteer without Chrome
- fetch HTML or markdown content for LLM and AI agent pipelines
- run fast headless browser automation in CI or cloud environments
- control a browser via natural language agent or MCP tools
- crawl thousands of pages quickly for data collection

## When to choose
- you need headless browsing for automation, scraping, or AI agents without graphical rendering
- headless Chrome is too slow or memory-hungry for your workload
- you want CDP compatibility with existing Playwright/Puppeteer tooling
- you need instant browser startup and isolated sessions for agent tasks

## When to avoid
- you need pixel-perfect rendering, screenshots, or full visual fidelity of complex pages
- you rely on niche browser features or extensions only Chromium/WebKit provide
- you need a fully mature, spec-complete browser engine for production-critical rendering
- you require Windows support or musl-based Alpine binaries out of the box

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: web-scraping, http-server, mcp, cli
- domain: web-development, artificial-intelligence, developer-tools, crawlers
- platform: cli, self-hosted
- tags: headless-browser, cdp, playwright, puppeteer, zig, browser-engine, ai-agents, web-crawling, browser-automation, automation, linux, macos, docker

## Member repositories
- lightpanda-io/browser (main) score 97

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:12:00.475884+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T16:27:42.545681+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser (fetched 2026-08-28T04:12:00.475884+00:00, sha 4a97524b6773)
  - homepage: https://lightpanda.io (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:21.570584+00:00, sha 5cb492826ddb)
  - site_page: https://lightpanda.io/docs (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:21.581311+00:00, sha 4fc72e4bc368)
  - site_page: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:21.585122+00:00, sha e651a4d1268d)
  - site_page: https://lightpanda.io/docs/quickstart/installation-and-setup (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:21.586774+00:00, sha 2dd9509a1b55)
  - site_page: https://lightpanda.io/pricing (fetched 2026-08-29T07:48:21.583351+00:00, sha 83c4ce26771f)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.