# Browserless vs Steel (slim)

> Browserless and Steel score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 70.4 (BB) and 70.4 (BB). Steel leads on payments & pricing. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Browserless doesn't. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browserless-vs-steel.md (~2,450 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browserless-vs-steel.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browserless-vs-steel
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Browserless and Steel score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 70.4 (BB) and 70.4 (BB). Steel leads on payments & pricing. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Browserless doesn't.

- Browserless: BB 70.4, rank #135 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/browserless.min.md
- Steel: BB 70.4, rank #136 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/steel.min.md
- Browserless, good for Agents that need a real browser in the cloud with stealth, proxies and CAPTCHA solving, and teams that want the option of running the same server themselves. Ahead on Reliability, 82 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 Payments & pricing, 75 against 40. Also An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account; Open source.

| Category | Browserless | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 82 | 58 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 89 | 86 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 78 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 53 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 75 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 82 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 62 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Browserless | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | browserless.io, Inc. | Nen Labs, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://production-sfo.browserless.io` | `https://api.steel.dev` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.01/call |
| Licence | SSPL 1.0 or a commercial licence for the core server and the MCP server. The BAP TypeScript SDK is MIT. BrowserQL, stealth and other cloud additions are proprietary | 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 | 14 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-05 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2025-02-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-02-05 |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 14k stars, 3.5k npm/wk | 47k npm/wk, 63k PyPI/wk |