# Notte vs Steel (slim)

> Steel scores 70.4 (BB) on agent readiness against Notte's 63.2 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Notte doesn't. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/notte-vs-steel.md (~2,350 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/notte-vs-steel.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/notte-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 Notte's 63.2 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. Notte doesn't.

- Notte: B 63.2, rank #317 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/notte.min.md
- Steel: BB 70.4, rank #136 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/steel.min.md
- Notte, good for Teams that want hosted browsers together with agents, vaults for logins, personas with mailboxes and scheduled browser functions behind one key.
- 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 74; Payments & pricing, 75 against 40. 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; Open source.

| Category | Notte | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 58 | 58 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 74 | 86 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 75 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 56 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 75 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 61 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Notte | Steel |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Notte Labs Inc. | Nen Labs, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.notte.cc` | `https://api.steel.dev` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.01/call |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under Notte's terms of service. The core repository is SSPL-1.0 and the Node SDK is MIT | 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 | 8 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | couldn't be read | 2025-02-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | couldn't be read | 2026-02-05 |
| Customer content may train models | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | couldn't be read | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | couldn't be read | yes |
| Popularity | 1.3k npm/wk, 5.1k PyPI/wk | 47k npm/wk, 63k PyPI/wk |