# Steel vs TinyFish (slim)

> Steel scores 70.4 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish's 67.7 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. TinyFish doesn't. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/steel-vs-tinyfish.md (~2,500 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/steel-vs-tinyfish.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/steel-vs-tinyfish
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Steel scores 70.4 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish's 67.7 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do browser automation. Steel accepts x402. TinyFish doesn't.

- Steel: BB 70.4, rank #149 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/steel.min.md
- TinyFish: B 67.7, rank #227 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/tinyfish.min.md
- 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 55; Transparency & trust, 64 against 59. 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.
- TinyFish, good for Agents that want one account for a goal-driven web agent, a raw CDP browser, and free search and fetch.

| Category | Steel | TinyFish |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 58 | 60 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 86 | 85 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 79 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 56 | 57 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 75 | 55 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 82 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 64 | 59 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Steel | TinyFish |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Nen Labs, Inc. | Tiny Fish, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.steel.dev` | `https://agent.tinyfish.ai` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| x402 | yes, from $0.01/call | no |
| Licence | 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 | Proprietary service under Tiny Fish's terms of service. The MCP proxy `@tiny-fish/mcp` and the cookbook are MIT. The SDK packages state no licence in npm or PyPI metadata |
| MCP registry | not listed | `ai.tinyfish.agent/web-agent` |
| Last release | 2026-10-02 | 2026-10-07 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-02-05 | 2026-08-17 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-02-05 | 2025-12-14 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 47k npm/wk, 63k PyPI/wk | 5.7k npm/wk, 6.5k PyPI/wk |