Lightpanda vs Obscura
Two of the top sandboxes, side by side: score, setup, license, activity and what each review found.
Lightpanda
Headless browser written in Zig for AI agents and scraping
Obscura
Rust headless browser with CDP, native rendering and stealth mode
| What we compare | Lightpanda | Obscura |
|---|---|---|
| Score parts, out of 100 | ||
| Adoption | 85, widely used | 72, popular |
| Freshness | 100, active | 100, active |
| Maintenance | 92, healthy | 91, healthy |
| Easy to run | 50, easy | 50, easy |
| Agent-ready | 70, partly | 30, minimal |
| Facts from GitHub and the README | ||
| Stars | 36.3k | 28.8k |
| License | AGPL-3.0 (copyleft) | Apache-2.0 (permissive) |
| Last commit | Oct 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| Last release | Oct 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| Language | Zig | Not stated |
| Docker | Yes | Yes |
| GPU | Not needed | Not needed |
| arm64 or Apple Silicon | Mentioned | Mentioned |
Lightpanda
Lightpanda is a headless browser written in Zig, built on V8 for JavaScript, libcurl for HTTP and html5ever for parsing, with no graphical rendering. It exposes a CDP server on port 9222 for Puppeteer and Playwright, plus WebDriver BiDi, an MCP server, and a built-in LLM agent mode. It can also dump pages as HTML, Markdown, PNG or PDF from the command line.
Who it is for: Engineers running browser automation or web-browsing agents at scale
Strengths
- README benchmark: 123MB peak vs 2GB for headless Chrome over 100 pages
- CDP server works with Puppeteer; WebDriver BiDi also supported
- MCP server over stdio or HTTP, with isolated or shared sessions
- Agent output saved as replayable JavaScript scripts that need no LLM at runtime
Weaknesses
- No native Windows build; WSL2 required
- Linux binaries need glibc; they fail on Alpine/musl
- Telemetry is on by default; opt out via environment variable
- Not a full browser: no graphical rendering, partial Web Platform Tests coverage
- no GPU
- Docker
- Models: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Vertex AI, Mistral
- port 9222
Obscura
Headless browser engine in Rust running V8 that speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol, so Puppeteer and Playwright connect on port 9222 as if to Chrome. Ships its own layout and paint engine for screenshots, screencasts and PDF export, a stealth build with per-session fingerprint randomization, a parallel scrape command and an MCP server. Claims 30 MB memory and 85 ms page loads against 200+ MB and about 500 ms for Chrome.
Who it is for: Scrapers and agent builders replacing headless Chrome
Strengths
- Single binary around 70 MiB, no Chrome or Node.js; distroless Docker image about 57 MB
- Stealth build randomizes fingerprints per session and blocks 3,520 tracker domains
- SSRF protection blocks private IPs by default; CDP token on the Docker image
- Fetch.takeResponseBodyAsStream and IO.read stream large downloads in chunks
Weaknesses
- Independent rendering engine; long-tail CSS, media playback and fonts can differ from Chromium
- Stealth builds need CMake, Clang and libclang; first source build takes about 5 minutes
- README carries heavy proxy-vendor sponsorship and discount codes
- Linux binaries target glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04)
- no GPU
- Docker
- port 9222