# Airtop vs Lightpanda (slim)

> Lightpanda scores 61.6 (C) to Airtop's 55.4 (C) for browser automation. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-lightpanda.md (~2,800 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-lightpanda.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-lightpanda
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Lightpanda scores 61.6 (C) on agent readiness against Airtop's 55.4 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do browser automation.

- Airtop: C 55.4, rank #783 of 1239 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/airtop.min.md
- Lightpanda: C 61.6, rank #542 of 1239 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/lightpanda.min.md
- Airtop, good for Agents that need a hosted browser with natural-language page calls, saved logins handed over by a person, and proxies and CAPTCHA solving in one service. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- Lightpanda, good for Agents and crawlers that read and fill many JavaScript pages in parallel on small machines, without needing pixel rendering. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 82 against 76; Agent ergonomics, 75 against 65; Payments & pricing, 40 against 25; Maintenance & community, 73 against 24. Also No key needed to call it; Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card; Open source.

| Category | Airtop | Lightpanda |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 69 | 65 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 76 | 82 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 65 | 75 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 46 | 46 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 24 | 73 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 62 | 65 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Airtop | Lightpanda |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | Switchboard Visual Technologies, Inc. (dba Airtop) | Selecy SAS (Lightpanda) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.airtop.ai/api` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy) |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Licence | Proprietary cloud service under Airtop's terms of use. The Node and Python SDKs are MIT per npm and PyPI | AGPL-3.0 for the browser. The npm wrapper @lightpanda/browser and the agent skill are Apache-2.0. Lightpanda Cloud is a closed service with no terms of service found |
| Tools exposed | none | 32 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-07-01 | 2026-10-23 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-07-29 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-09-02 | 2026-08-03 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes |  |
| Popularity | 16 stars, 16k npm/wk, 246 PyPI/wk | 9.3k npm/wk |