11st of 8 in Sandboxes
Lightpanda
Headless browser written in Zig for AI agents and scraping
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- Stars
- 36.2k
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Oct 2026
- Language
- Zig
Overview
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
What it needs
- no GPU
- Docker
- Models: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Vertex AI, Mistral
- port 9222
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