Lightpanda
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The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
Lightpanda is a headless browser written from scratch in Zig, not another Chromium wrapper. Your Puppeteer or Playwright scripts connect to it over CDP just as they'd connect to headless Chrome. On the project's own 100-page benchmark it used about 16x less memory and finished about 9x faster. It's AGPL-3.0 and free to self-host.
Running it is a single binary or one docker run exposing a CDP server on port 9222. Version 1.0 shipped in October; it now speaks WebDriver BiDi, runs as an MCP server for AI agents, and has an agent mode that saves a session as a replayable script. Linux and macOS only; Windows goes through WSL.
Lightpanda Cloud is the paid side: Explorer is free with 10 browser hours a month, Builder is $19/month for 300 hours and 30 concurrent sessions, then $0.08 per extra hour. Bring your own proxy on both. Solo: self-host or Explorer. Small teams: Builder, or Browserless and Browserbase if you need real Chrome. At scale, self-hosting is where the memory savings pay off.
The catch: it isn't Chrome. PNG and PDF dumps are text-only renderings, so visual testing is out, and JavaScript-heavy sites can still break. Telemetry is on by default.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
free self hosted paid cloudFree: The browser is AGPL-3.0-only with no feature gates: CDP and WebDriver BiDi servers, fetch to HTML/Markdown, an MCP server (stdio or HTTP with per-agent sessions), and agent mode with any LLM you bring (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama and others) or --no-llm. Lightpanda Cloud's Explorer plan is $0 forever: 10 browser hours per month, 5 concurrent sessions, community support on Discord, bring your own proxy.
Self-hosted: Single binary for Linux (glibc only, so no Alpine) and macOS on x86_64 and aarch64, or the official Docker image. No native Windows build; use WSL. Telemetry is on by default; set LIGHTPANDA_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true to turn it off. AGPL applies if you modify it and offer it to others over a network. Contributors sign a CLA.
Paid: Lightpanda Cloud Builder is $19/month with 300 browser hours included, then $0.08 per extra hour, 30 concurrent sessions, email and Slack support, bring your own proxy. Enterprise is custom: volume pricing, SLA, dedicated support, on-premise or private cloud. Cloud sessions run Lightpanda by default; browser=chrome switches a session to Google Chrome for debugging, which they say isn't meant for production traffic.
Free to self-host under AGPL. The cloud gives you 10 browser hours a month free; Builder is $19/month for 300 hours, then $0.08 an hour.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; one binary or docker run, or the cloud's free 10 hours a month
- Small team
- free self-hosted, or cloud Builder at $19/month for 300 hours
- Medium team
- free self-hosted; the memory savings matter most on scraping fleets
- Large team
- self-host, or cloud Enterprise for SLA, volume pricing and private-cloud installs
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