Browserbase vs Browser Use vs Steel: Giving Your Agent a Browser of Its Own

Our last comparison covered three hosted computer-use agents you can start using today: ChatGPT's agent mode, Claude's computer use, and Google's browser features. Those are destinations. You show up, the sandbox already exists, and the vendor decides what the agent gets to touch.

This guide is for the step underneath that: the point where you, or a tool you're evaluating, want an agent to drive a browser nobody packaged for you. That means choosing browser infrastructure: the layer that opens a Chrome instance, holds a session open, and reports back what happened on the page. Three names come up constantly: Browserbase, Browser Use, and Steel. They solve the same problem from three angles, and the right pick has less to do with features than with how much of the stack you want to own.

What "browser infrastructure" means, and why it isn't a computer-use agent

A computer-use agent is the brain: a model that looks at a screen and decides what to click next. Browser infrastructure is the body, an actual browser running somewhere with a real IP address, real cookies, and a session that survives more than one request. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google each bundle their own body with their own brain. The three platforms below sell only the body, on the assumption that plenty of builders already have a brain, their own agent code or a model's computer-use API, and just need somewhere dependable to run it.

That split matters because it's where DIY agent projects quietly fail. A browser opened on a laptop gets flagged as a bot within minutes, loses its session on a restart, or ties up the machine for the length of every task. A managed browser layer solves exactly that: sessions that persist, proxies that don't get blacklisted by the fifth site they touch, and a recording of what the agent actually did when a run goes wrong.

Browserbase, the polished default

Browserbase positions itself as a complete platform rather than a single tool: hosted browser sessions, search and fetch APIs for pulling web data without a full page render, a model gateway billing usage from any AI provider through one key, and session replay for reviewing a run afterward. It also built Stagehand, an open-source framework that layers AI primitives (act, extract, observe) on top of standard Playwright code, the piece most people actually write agent logic in.

As of July 2026, verified against Browserbase's own pricing page, plans run free (3 concurrent browsers, 1 browser hour, 15-minute sessions, 7-day data retention), Developer at $20 a month (25 concurrent browsers, 100 browser hours included, then $0.12 an hour, 1GB of proxy bandwidth), and Startup at $99 a month (100 concurrent browsers, 500 hours included, 30-day retention, 5GB of proxy). A custom Scale tier above that adds SSO and a HIPAA BAA for anyone with compliance requirements. The pattern across every tier is the same: you pay for browser hours and proxy bandwidth, and the free plan is usable for testing an idea before a card gets involved.

Browserbase is the pick when reliability matters more than shaving a subscription fee, and when paying for a maintained platform beats debugging someone else's captcha workaround at midnight.

Browser Use, the open-source agent

Browser Use ships as two things: an open-source framework you can run yourself for free, and a hosted cloud version that adds managed sessions, proxies and a packaged agent so the pieces don't need wiring together by hand. The open-source repository is consistently ranked among the most-starred AI agent projects on GitHub, and that following shows in how the tool feels day to day: heavily documented, actively maintained, and usually the first answer when someone asks how to give a language model working hands on a real webpage.

Cloud pricing, verified against Browser Use's own pricing page in July 2026, runs free (3 concurrent sessions, community support), Dev at $29 a month (25 concurrent sessions, bring-your-own API key), Business at $299 a month (200 concurrent sessions, unlimited team members) and Scaleup at $999 a month (500 concurrent sessions). Underneath those plans, raw browser sessions bill at $0.02 an hour, and the hosted agent itself bills per token at roughly 1.2 times the model provider's own rate when you supply your own key. There's also Browser Use Box, a dedicated small server from $1 a day, for anyone who wants one persistent personal agent running rather than sessions spun up on demand.

Browser Use is the pick for anyone who'd rather read the code than trust a vendor's word for it, or who's price-sensitive enough that self-hosting the free version is a real option, not a theoretical one.

Steel, the open infrastructure layer

Steel takes the same open-source-first stance as Browser Use but stays one level lower: it doesn't ship an agent, only the browser. The pitch is a session API you point Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium at, plus the details that decide whether a cloud browser survives contact with a real website: automatic captcha solving, fingerprint management, and sessions that run up to 24 hours with cookies and local storage carried between them. Steel's own documentation shows it running underneath Browser Use, Anthropic's computer use, and OpenAI's computer use models, a fair summary of how the company wants it used: as the browser underneath somebody else's agent brain, including the hosted ones covered in our computer-use comparison.

Pricing as of July 2026, verified against Steel's own site: a Launch tier at $0 a month with a one-time $30 credit, a Scale tier at $250 a month with $100 in monthly credit plus a dedicated Slack channel and HIPAA-ready terms, and custom Enterprise pricing above 1,000 concurrent sessions. The whole stack is open source and self-hostable through Docker, which is the real differentiator: nothing stops a technical enough reader from running Steel on their own hardware and paying nothing but electricity.

Steel is the pick when you already have agent logic, your own, or built on Browser Use, Claude or ChatGPT's computer-use models, and just need somewhere open and inexpensive to run the browser it drives.

Head to head

The permission question doesn't disappear because you built it yourself

Every safeguard this site has written about for hosted computer-use agents (scoped credentials, confirmation gates, an audit trail) applies with more force here, not less. A self-run agent has no vendor confirmation wall between a bad decision and a real consequence; that wall is now something you have to build yourself. All three platforms hand you the primitives: Browserbase and Steel both offer session replay so you can watch what a run did, and Browser Use logs every step. None of them enforce good judgment on your behalf, because that was never their job.

The rules from our permission model hold regardless of which browser layer sits underneath: start the agent read-only, graduate to draft-and-confirm before letting it submit anything, and keep payments, credentials and irreversible actions off the table until one specific task has earned trust through repetition. A cheap, fast browser session doesn't change the blast radius of a bad click. It just makes it easier to repeat that click a thousand times before anyone notices, a failure mode covered in more detail in our security mistakes guide.

Which one to actually pick

For a single personal project, start with whichever free tier removes the most friction. Browser Use's free tier is the fastest path to a working agent this afternoon, since the agent logic ships with it already. Steel's free credit is the right start if you already have agent code (your own, or Claude's or ChatGPT's computer-use models) and only need somewhere to run the browser underneath it. Browserbase earns its higher entry price once a project needs to run without your attention, or once session replay and real support beat saving twenty dollars a month.

None of this is a permanent decision. All three speak close enough to the same Playwright-based session model that switching later costs an afternoon of rewiring, not a rebuild from scratch. Pick whichever gets one real task working this week, and treat the platform choice as reversible. The permission habits covered across the rest of this site are the part that actually has to be right from day one.

Frequently asked questions

Browser infrastructure changes pricing and features often enough that any comparison has a shelf life. When one of these three changes terms in a way that matters for a personal setup, we send one email about it: get the agent-world updates here.

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