#99th of 29 in Data and scraping for AI
moli
Headless browser in Rust for AI agents, with CDP and WebDriver support
- Stars
- 20.4k
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Oct 2026
- Language
- Rust
327 on 14 Aug 202620,407 on 23 Oct 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
Moli is a standalone browser kernel written in Rust (V8, Stylo, Taffy, Parley), not a Chromium wrapper. The CLI fetches pages as HTML, Markdown, JSON or a semantic tree, and `moli serve` exposes CDP, WebDriver Classic and WebDriver BiDi on one endpoint. Layout and painting run only when `--layout` is set and an operation needs them.
Who it is for: Engineers building crawlers, browser agents or RL environments
Ranked among open-source alternatives to Apify (#8 of 10) and LlamaParse (#7 of 10).
Strengths
- Single binary serves CDP, WebDriver Classic and BiDi; no ChromeDriver or Chrome install needed
- Reported median RSS of 73 MiB on a 192-URL crawl, versus 773 MiB for Chrome Headless
- CLI dumps Markdown, semantic tree text, PNG screenshots and PDF directly
- Playwright connects over CDP; Linux, macOS and Windows supported
Weaknesses
- Lexbench pass rate is 81.9% against Chrome's 99.8%, so some sites will fail
- No GUI, GPU compositor, or high-fidelity Canvas, WebGL or media playback
- Screenshot and print modes are partial; real layout needs the `--layout` flag
- Benchmarks are published by the project's own authors
What it needs
- no GPU
- Needs libcurl
- port 9222
Quick answers
Is moli open source?
Yes. Its code is on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license.
Does moli need a GPU?
No, it runs without one.
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