# Anchor Browser vs Kane CLI (slim)

> Anchor Browser scores 60.1 (C) to Kane CLI's 55.3 (C) for browser automation. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-browser-vs-kane-cli.md (~5,550 tokens) · this version ~3,280 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-browser-vs-kane-cli.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-browser-vs-kane-cli
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-01
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Anchor Browser scores 60.1 (C) on agent readiness against Kane CLI's 55.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Kane CLI leads on maintenance & community. Both do browser automation.

- Anchor Browser: C 60.1, rank #615 of 1260 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/anchor-browser.min.md
- Kane CLI: C 55.3, rank #805 of 1260 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/kane-cli.min.md
- Anchor Browser, good for Agents that must work inside signed-in accounts, with managed identities, MFA handling and a human sign-in link, and agents that need to start with no human signup. Ahead on Reliability, 77 against 50; Agent ergonomics, 73 against 65; Payments & pricing, 30 against 20; Transparency & trust, 53 against 38. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Free to start without a card.
- Kane CLI, good for Coding agents and CI that need to check a web or mobile app in a real browser or device and keep replayable Markdown tests with evidence. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 77 against 57. Also No incidents deducted, where Anchor Browser loses 3 points for them.

| Category | Anchor Browser | Kane CLI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 77 | 50 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 80 | 77 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 73 | 65 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 54 | 55 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 57 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 53 | 38 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Anchor Browser | Kane CLI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Anchor Forge Inc. | TestMu AI (formerly LambdaTest) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.anchorbrowser.io` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| Licence | Proprietary cloud service. No service agreement was found, only a website terms of use. The TypeScript and Python SDKs and the self-hosted MCP server are Apache-2.0 | The npm wrapper, skill and repository are Apache-2.0. The runner, assurance and pinned Node binaries it installs are labelled Apache-2.0 on npm, but their source isn't in the linked repository. TestMu AI's service terms weren't read |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-07-28 | 2026-10-28 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-02-24 | no document linked |
| Popularity | 43k npm/wk, 10k PyPI/wk | 2.1k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.3/5 (4) | none |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Anchor Browser +27: Anchor Browser 77 (Graded as a hosted service. status.anchorbrowser.io runs on incident.io with two components, Website and Anchor Application (20). Both show operational on 1 November, and the RSS feed is still empty. The page has recorded no incident since it was set up in June 2025. This run reads a readable page that has never posted an incident as a clean record at 20, as for quicken-simplifi, outline and linkup, where the 8 October check gave 25, a value the checklist doesn't name (20). Limits are published, 5, 25 and 100 session creations a minute and 5, 25 and 200 concurrent browsers by plan, and 2,000 requests a minute on Web Unlocker (15). The OpenAPI document declares 429 on ten operations, with `RateLimit` and `Retry-After` headers on session creation, and the Web Unlocker docs say to retry 429, 500, 503 and 504 with exponential backoff. The sessions guide now says a 429 from the per-minute limiter comes before a session exists, so retrying it doesn't create a second one, that the API reads no `Idempotency-Key`, so retrying a 5xx or 409 can, and which statuses are terminal. Safe-retry guidance without idempotency keys, read as e2b's (12). No SLA was found on the pricing page, the docs or the site (0). The API is version 1.0.0, the SDKs are 1.0 and nothing marks the sessions API as beta (10). 20 + 20 + 15 + 12 + 0 + 10 = 77.); Kane CLI 50 (Graded with the hosted lines, because every run, exploration and design job goes through TestMu AI's service and spends credits, and Exploration runs on HyperExecute. status.lambdatest.io (Statusfy) lists Kane CLI and KaneAI as their own components with incident history and an Atom feed (20). From 3 August to 1 November 2026 no incident names Kane CLI or KaneAI. The platform under it had test creation timeouts from 09:00 to 13:30 UTC on 28 September with slow Automation and HyperExecute starts, six hours of partial macOS HyperExecute degradation on 25 September, and real-device partial outages on 21 August and 22 October (57 minutes). Judgement call, 10 for multi-hour degradation of the service runs depend on. No request rate limit is published; the only numbers are Exploration's built-in limits (an hour, 400 actions or 800 model calls), 20 cloud browsers and a 15-minute real-device queue (5 of 15). No 429 or Retry-After guidance. `maintain reconcile` is documented as idempotent, Exploration refuses a second run with `RUN_ACTIVE`, and the skill says never to rerun a paid command just to get a support id (5 of 15). No SLA found; the terms weren't readable (0). Nothing in the repository labels Kane CLI or Exploration beta or preview (10).)
- Maintenance & community, Kane CLI +20: Anchor Browser 57 (The newest dated releases are the TypeScript SDK 1.0.0 on npm on 26 July 2026, per the 8 October check, and the Python SDK 1.0.1, tagged in its repository on 28 July, 96 days before 1 November. Neither repository has a commit after 28 July. The pricing page dates its AI step prices from 21 August 2026, 72 days before, the newest dated change to the service (20). In the 90 days from 3 August that pricing change is the only dated entry we found, and blog announcements carry no readable year. No dated changelog (10). No public changelog. Support is by email, with Slack on Growth and above. GitHub issues weren't read, since GitHub's pages and API answer 403 in our session (5). Official SDKs for TypeScript and Python are current at 1.0. The MCP servers were not found in the MCP registry, per the 8 October check (15). The SDK repositories have CI and publish workflows whose results we did not read, and the self-hosted MCP server's last commit is 24 July 2025 (7). 20 + 10 + 5 + 15 + 7 = 57.); Kane CLI 77 (0.10.0 on npm on 28 October 2026, 4 days ago (30). 28 releases from 3 August to 1 November 2026, 0.8.4 to 0.10.0, each in the changelog (20). The repository has 337 commits, pull requests up to #222 merged within days by LambdaTest staff, a Discord and an issue tracker. GitHub's API wasn't reachable from this session, so open issues and reply times weren't counted (12 of 25). Not an MCP server. The CLI and skill are current on npm and a Homebrew tap, with no SDK (10 of 15). CI runs the skill installer's tests on Linux, macOS and Windows with Node 18 and 22. The CLI's own source and tests aren't public, and the main package carries no npm provenance attestation while the skill package does (5 of 10). Kane CLI is six and a half months old by its first npm release.)
- Transparency & trust, Anchor Browser +15: Anchor Browser 53 (The service is closed. The SDKs and the self-hosted MCP server are Apache-2.0. The only terms published are a website terms of use dated 16 March 2025, which grants personal, non-commercial use of the site and does not cover the API, so the terms for the paid service are unclear (8). The security page says session data is not stored and each browser's virtual machine is destroyed, the pricing page gives 7 days of data retention, recordings are on by default, and Zero Data Retention is by request. The privacy policy (24 February 2026) covers the website and customer contacts, with one product section on Gmail access. The DPA and data handling policy sit behind an access request (15). The legacy tasks API and the old MCP address are labelled and still work, and the SDK has a migration guide. No deprecation policy or dates (5). The security page names AWS us-east-2 and eu-central-1. The trust portal has a subprocessor section, of which our reader saw only OpenAI and Anthropic (12). Terms and privacy policy dates unchanged on 1 November. 8 + 15 + 5 + 12 = 40.); Kane CLI 38 (The editorial half. The wrapper, skill and docs are Apache-2.0. The runner, assurance and pinned Node binaries are labelled Apache-2.0 on npm with no source in the linked repository, and the service terms couldn't be read (12 of 30). The repository says what leaves the machine. Every run uploads to Test Manager with screenshots and an evidence pack recording the user's name and email, secrets are masked, credentials are stored with mode 0600, and the evidence viewer reads packs locally. The privacy policy, DPA and retention periods are on testmuai.com and weren't read (10 of 30). The changelog calls out breaking changes, such as the removal of the bare-objective shortcut in 0.4.1, but there's no deprecation policy or dated notice period (5 of 20). The changelog describes telemetry (a remote log, support ids, errors spooled and sent at exit) and a daily npm update check. The opt-out `KANE_TELEMETRY=0` appears only in a skill reference, not the user guide (8 of 20).)
- Payments & pricing, Anchor Browser +10: Anchor Browser 30 (No machine payment protocol was confirmed on Anchor's own endpoints. A blog post dated 29 August 2025 shows x402 on `POST /v1/sessions`, but our unpaid request on 1 November 2026 returned 401 "Unauthorized, please log in.", as on 8 October, and the docs don't describe it. The session option named `x402` lets a browser pay other sites (0). Per-browser, per-hour, per-GB, per-step and, now, per-run prices for Automation Tasks (0.1 credits, $0.10, with failed runs not charged the task fee) are published without login (20). The Free plan has $5 of credits a month. Agent Access, which granted 1 credit with no account and no card, answered "Agent Access is disabled" on 1 November, and whether dashboard sign-up asks for a card wasn't read, so half, as smartsheet's unconfirmed trial (10). With Agent Access disabled, a key comes from a dashboard account at app.anchorbrowser.io, which a person creates in a browser (0). 0 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 30.); Kane CLI 20 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices are public per the listing check of 1 November 2026 (Starter $17 a month billed annually, Pro $89), and `run_end` reports credits per run, but the credit price per run isn't published, so plan-only pricing (10). The release says "free to start" and the check found a 10,000-credit, 30-day trial; whether it needs a card couldn't be read today. Judgement call (10 of 20). A person signs up and approves OAuth in a browser, or copies an access key from the dashboard, before any run (0).)
- Agent ergonomics, Anchor Browser +8: Anchor Browser 73 (The main MCP server lists about 24 tools and reaches the other REST routes through `list_endpoints`, `get_endpoint` and two call tools. Browser control and per-site actions are separate servers, and the docs warn that `/v1/mcp/actions` without a domain lists thousands of tools. 15 for the tool count plus 5 for the split servers (20). Session lists take `page`, `limit`, sort, search and filters by status, tag, domain and date, volumes use a cursor, and webhook deliveries take `limit` and `offset` (17). Errors return an integer code and a message, 402 marks exhausted credits, and Agent Access errors name the next call. No stable machine-readable error codes were found (13). No idempotency keys. The MCP server splits `call_endpoint_read` from `call_endpoint_write`, and batch sessions have a retry-failed call. Tool annotations were not read because the server needs a key (8). A session starts from an empty body, and the SDKs cover TypeScript and Python (15). 20 + 17 + 13 + 8 + 15 = 73.); Kane CLI 65 (Graded on the CLI as an agent drives it. `run_end` carries `summary`, `one_liner` and only the values asked for with "store as" in `final_state`, and `--max-steps` and `--timeout` bound a run. The skill an agent loads is about 40 KB with 25 reference files (15 of 25). `testrun` selects by paths, `--match` and `--tags`, `explore list` and `explore sessions` filter by run, and `--json` on design and review commands; few size controls beyond that (14 of 20). Exit codes separate pass, fail, setup error and timeout, failure reasons are named, and refusals name the command to run next (18 of 20). Replays of saved tests come from cache, reconcile resumes rather than re-billing, and Exploration allows one run at a time. A one-shot `run` has no idempotency key and Exploration's default can change data (10 of 20). One required argument for `run`; Exploration's `mutating` default isn't a safe one; no SDKs, only the CLI from npm, Homebrew and a shell script (8 of 15).)