Lightpanda: the headless browser designed for AI and automation

Combining the flexibility of a Headless Chrome API with an innovative tailor-made browser for unmatched performance and efficiency in browser automation.

Lightpanda is the open-source browser made for headless usage:

• Javascript execution
• Support of Web APIs (partial, WIP)
• Compatible with Playwright, Puppeteer through CDP (WIP)

Fast web automation for AI agents, LLM training, scraping and testing with minimal memory footprint:

• Ultra-low memory footprint (9x less than Chrome)
• Exceptionally fast execution (11x faster than Chrome) & instant startup

See benchmark details.

Why?

Javascript execution is mandatory for the modern web

In the good old days, scraping a webpage was as easy as making an HTTP request, cURL-like. It’s not possible anymore, because Javascript is everywhere, like it or not:

• Ajax, Single Page App, infinite loading, “click to display”, instant search, etc.
• JS web frameworks: React, Vue, Angular & others

Chrome is not the right tool

If we need Javascript, why not use a real web browser? Take a huge desktop application, hack it, and run it on the server. Hundreds or thousands of instances of Chrome if you use it at scale. Are you sure it’s such a good idea?

• Heavy on RAM and CPU, expensive to run
• Hard to package, deploy and maintain at scale
• Bloated, lots of features are not useful in headless usage

Lightpanda is built for performance

If we want both Javascript and performance in a true headless browser, we need to start from scratch. Not another iteration of Chromium, really from a blank page. Crazy right? But that’s what we did:

• Not based on Chromium, Blink or WebKit
• Low-level system programming language (Zig) with optimisations in mind
• Opinionated: without graphical rendering