Instead of Puppeteer: Lightpanda

Why Lightpanda is better

• Lightpanda's benchmark, loading 100 real pages on an AWS m5.large, finished in 5 seconds against 46 seconds for headless Chrome, with peak memory of 123MB against 2GB.
• Your scripts stay Puppeteer scripts. You install puppeteer-core instead of puppeteer, call puppeteer.connect() with Lightpanda's endpoint instead of puppeteer.launch(), and page.goto, selectors and evaluate work as before.
• Lightpanda skips graphical rendering. Headless Chrome still computes graphical output nobody looks at, which is the overhead Lightpanda removes for jobs that only need the DOM and JavaScript.
• Lightpanda 1.0 passes 1,739,845 Web Platform Tests subtests, about 80% of Chrome's count, up from 2,645 at the November 2024 beta.
• It ships as one binary or a Docker image, enforces CORS by default, and has flags such as --block-private-networks that keep a scraper away from internal addresses.

When to keep Puppeteer

Keep Puppeteer's own Chrome when you need pixels. Lightpanda has no graphical rendering, so its PNG and PDF output is a text-only rendering and visual or layout tests cannot work on it. Keep Chrome too for sites that rely on Web APIs Lightpanda has not implemented yet, and on Windows, where Lightpanda has no native binary and runs only inside WSL.

Switching

A small change for most scripts. Install Lightpanda (a binary, a Docker image, or the npm package @lightpanda/browser), start it with lightpanda serve, and replace puppeteer.launch() with puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint: "ws://127.0.0.1:9222" }) using puppeteer-core. Run every target site through it and keep Chrome as a fallback for the pages that break.

Watch out

Lightpanda is young. Version 1.0 shipped in October 2026 and it still misses part of the web platform, mostly the CSS, editing and SVG areas that need rendering. It is licensed AGPL-3.0, which matters if you modify it and offer it as a network service. It sends usage telemetry unless you set LIGHTPANDA_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true. The Linux binaries need glibc, so Alpine images do not work. One company, Lightpanda, builds it.

Also worth a look

• Playwright An automation library on the same layer as Puppeteer, with Python, Java and .NET bindings; it connects to Lightpanda with chromium.connectOverCDP, and with its own bundled browsers it is the choice when you also need Firefox or WebKit.

More newer, better browser automation tools and headless browsers

• Selenium →, use Playwright
• Cypress →, use Playwright