Compare · Lightpanda and Moli
Webfold vs Lightpanda and Moli
All four engines finished 363 of 363 tasks. Webfold had about 3.3 times the throughput of Moli. It had 1.6 times Lightpanda's. Moli starts 1 ms sooner. Lightpanda's memory is within a megabyte of Webfold's.
Lightpanda is built to serve CDP without a full browser. So is Moli. We ran the same scripted task on all four engines. All four finished 363 of 363 tasks.
Webfold on its own
How fast is Webfold alone?
Each job is measured on its own. The performance page states the figures once. We link them here.
- Run a page's scripts and drive it like a browser: 8 ms to start, 70.7 ms a scripted task. 106.6 tasks a second in 30 MB.
Now the comparison
Webfold against Lightpanda and Moli
| Aspect | Webfold | Lightpanda and Moli |
|---|---|---|
| Cold start | 8 ms | Moli 7 ms; Lightpanda 23 ms |
| Warm task, median | 70.7 ms | Moli 137.9 ms; Lightpanda 113.9 ms |
| Concurrent tasks per second | 106.6 | Moli 32.1; Lightpanda 65.1 |
| Resident memory | 30 MB | Moli 88 MB; Lightpanda 31 MB |
| CPU seconds for the run | 0.8 | Moli 6.7; Lightpanda 1.4 |
| Lexbench, the independent agent-browser benchmark (1,928 tasks) | 1,928 passed (our run of their suite). | Moli 1,556 (80.7%), Lightpanda 845 (43.8%) in the published run; 80.2% and 61.4% in a later recorded run. |
Where is each tool ahead?
Where Lightpanda and Moli is ahead
- Moli starts one millisecond sooner (7 against 8 ms).
- Lightpanda's memory is within a megabyte of Webfold's (31 against 30 MB).
- Lightpanda focuses on headless automation alone. It has its own ecosystem.
Where Webfold is ahead
- About 3.3 times the throughput of Moli. About 1.6 times Lightpanda's. CPU is lower.
- About 1.6 times faster per task than Lightpanda. About 1.9 times faster than Moli.
- It passes every Lexbench task. Moli's own makers publish Lexbench.
- One binary holds the same extraction engine. It holds documents. It holds WARC. It holds an MCP server.
How do I move from Lightpanda and Moli to Webfold?
| If you use | In Webfold |
|---|---|
| CDP endpoint | point the client at webfold headless serve |
What is the evidence?
Each figure states its dataset. It states its limits.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is this a fair comparison?
Lightpanda failed 210 of 363 tasks when all eight workers shared one connection and passes with one connection each, which is how we ran it. The fixture is one page on one shared VM; ratios are meaningful, digits are not. The Lexbench figures for Moli and Lightpanda are from the benchmark's published results.
Try it on your own pages.
Run the command-line tool. Join the waitlist for the hosted API.