# Browser Use vs Steel (slim)

> Browser Use scores 77.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Steel's 70.4 (BB), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Steel leads on maintenance & community. Both do browser automation. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browser-use-vs-steel.md (~2,450 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browser-use-vs-steel.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browser-use-vs-steel
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Browser Use scores 77.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Steel's 70.4 (BB), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Steel leads on maintenance & community. Both do browser automation.

- Browser Use: BB 77.9, rank #16 of 629 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/browser-use.min.md
- Steel: BB 70.4, rank #129 of 629 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/steel.min.md
- Browser Use, good for An agent that wants to hand a whole browser task to a hosted agent and get a result back, or that needs a low-cost cloud browser over CDP, and for unattended agents that can pay by x402. Ahead on Reliability, 87 against 58; Payments & pricing, 90 against 75.
- 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 Maintenance & community, 82 against 77.

| Category | Browser Use | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 87 | 58 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 85 | 86 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 78 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 59 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 90 | 75 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 77 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 65 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Browser Use | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Browser Use | Nen Labs, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.browser-use.com/api/v4` | `https://api.steel.dev` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, stdio |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | yes | yes, from $0.01/call |
| Licence | MIT for the open-source library and the SDK. Browser Use Cloud is a proprietary service under Browser Use's terms of service | 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 |
| Tools exposed | 7 | none |
| MCP registry | `com.browser-use/browser-use` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-07-15 | 2025-02-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-02-05 |
| Customer content may train models | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 117k stars, 107k npm/wk, 2.1M PyPI/wk | 47k npm/wk, 63k PyPI/wk |