# Airtop vs Steel (slim)

> Steel scores 70.4 (BB) on agent readiness against Airtop's 55.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Airtop leads on reliability. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Airtop doesn't. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-steel.md (~2,400 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-steel.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-steel
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Steel scores 70.4 (BB) on agent readiness against Airtop's 55.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Airtop leads on reliability. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Airtop doesn't.

- Airtop: C 55.3, rank #511 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/airtop.min.md
- Steel: BB 70.4, rank #136 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/steel.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. Ahead on Reliability, 69 against 58.
- Steel, good for Agents that need a real cloud browser with persistent profiles, stored logins, CAPTCHA solving and a human takeover path, and teams that want an open-source runtime they can also self-host. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 86 against 76; Agent ergonomics, 79 against 65; Security & auth, 56 against 46; Payments & pricing, 75 against 25; Maintenance & community, 82 against 24. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account; Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card; Open source.

| Category | Airtop | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 69 | 58 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 76 | 86 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 65 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 46 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 75 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 24 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 61 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Airtop | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Switchboard Visual Technologies, Inc. (dba Airtop) | Nen Labs, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.airtop.ai/api` | `https://api.steel.dev` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.01/call |
| Licence | Proprietary cloud service under Airtop's terms of use. The Node and Python SDKs are MIT per npm and PyPI | Proprietary cloud service under Steel's terms. steel-browser and the Node and Python SDKs are Apache-2.0. The MCP server and the CLI are MIT |
| Last release | 2026-07-01 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-07-29 | 2025-02-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-09-02 | 2026-02-05 |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 16 stars, 16k npm/wk, 246 PyPI/wk | 47k npm/wk, 63k PyPI/wk |