Lightpanda

Lightpanda is an open-source headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation, with more than 37,000 stars on GitHub. Written in Zig rather than forked from Chromium, it skips graphical rendering, using about 16 times less memory and running about 9 times faster than headless Chrome.

Overview

AI agents that browse the web have a browser problem: Chrome was built for humans, so it is slow, heavy, and expensive to run at cloud scale. Lightpanda is a new browser engine designed for machines instead. It executes JavaScript, parses pages, and serves the standard automation protocols, but without the rendering overhead — so agent fleets can fetch, click, and extract from thousands of pages for a fraction of the cost. A native agent mode, an MCP server, and a dedicated skill let agents drive it directly, and recorded sessions replay as deterministic, token-free scripts.

Key Features

• Built for speed and lightness: On 933 real pages, peak memory for 100 pages is about 123 MB versus 2 GB for headless Chrome, and execution time 5 seconds versus 46 seconds.
• Real JavaScript execution: A full DOM, fetch and XHR support, cookies, proxies, network interception, and an ad blocker handle the modern, script-heavy web.
• Standard automation protocols: Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi servers work with existing Puppeteer and Playwright scripts by simply changing the connection endpoint.
• Native agent mode: Describe a task in plain English and the built-in agent navigates, clicks, fills forms, and extracts data, supporting Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, OpenRouter, and local models.
• Token-free replay: Agent sessions export as PandaScript, plain JavaScript with native browser primitives, so you can prototype with a model and ship deterministic scripts to production.
• MCP server and skill: A native Model Context Protocol server with isolated per-agent browsing sessions, plus a dedicated agent skill, plugs Lightpanda straight into agent frameworks.
• Flexible output: Dump pages as HTML, Markdown, PNG, PDF, or structured data (JSON-LD, OpenGraph, meta tags), with robots.txt respected by default.

Pricing

Lightpanda is free and open source under the AGPL license, with free nightly binaries and Docker images. A paid Cloud offer is available for teams that want hosted, scalable browser capacity instead of running their own fleet.

Who Is It For

Lightpanda is for AI agent developers, automation engineers, and scraping teams who need a fast, lightweight, programmable browser — especially anyone running browser workloads for agents at cloud scale.