8 Best Steel Alternatives in 2026 (Open Source)
Steel — 🔥 Open Source Browser API for AI Agents & Apps. Steel Browser is a batteries-included browser sandbox that lets you automate the web without worrying about infrastructure. Purpose-built browser infrastructure for AI agents — combines session management, stealth, proxy rotation, and Puppeteer/Playwright compatibility in one API
Short answer
- Closest match to Steel: Browser-Use.
- Most actively developed: Skyvern (1,313 commits in the last 90 days).
- Fastest growing: Browser-Use (+5,103 GitHub stars in the last 30 days).
- No commit in 6+ months: LaVague, BrowserGPT, Codel and vimGPT and 1 more.
These 8 open-source tools do the same job. They are ordered by how closely they match Steel, with live GitHub data so you can see which projects are actively maintained.
By package downloads Browser-Use is the most used here (7.4M in the last 30 days), and it also has the most GitHub stars. See all agent tools by downloads.
| Tool | GitHub stars | Stars / 30d | Last commit | Downloads / 30d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steel(original) | 7.7k | +156 | 2026-09-28 | — |
| Browser-Use | 117.0k | +5,103 | 2026-10-03 | 7.4M |
| Skyvern | 23.1k | +340 | 2026-10-03 | — |
| Notte | 2.0k | +14 | 2026-10-03 | — |
| LaVague | 6.4k | +12 | 2025-01-21 | 142 |
| BrowserGPT | 421 | 0 | 2026-02-03 | — |
| Codel | 2.5k | +4 | 2024-04-05 | — |
| vimGPT | 2.6k | -3 | 2024-09-25 | — |
| Tarsier | 1.8k | +2 | 2024-10-01 | — |
1. Browser-Use
🌐 Make websites accessible for AI agents. Automate tasks online with ease.
What sets it apart: Unlike Selenium/Playwright (code-based browser automation), Browser Use enables natural language browser control with vision AI — the first open-source library purpose-built for LLM-driven web agent tasks
Best for: Automating repetitive web tasks like form filling, data extraction, and e-commerce workflows; QA teams needing AI-driven browser testing without writing Selenium/Playwright scripts
2. Skyvern
Automate browser based workflows with AI
What sets it apart: vs Browser Use: Playwright-native SDK with AI fallback mode (selector-first, AI-second) rather than pure vision approach; vs Puppeteer/Playwright: adds AI understanding so automations survive layout changes
Best for: Automating workflows on websites that change frequently; Non-technical users building browser automations; Cross-site data extraction without custom scrapers
3. Notte
🌸 Best framework to build web agents, and deploy serverless web automation functions on reliable browser infra.
What sets it apart: vs Browser-Use/Convergence: 2x faster task completion (47s vs 113s), 96.6% reliability, and hybrid scripting+AI approach that cuts costs 50%+ while maintaining accuracy
Best for: Building reliable web automation agents at scale; Scraping and structured data extraction from websites; Enterprise web workflows with credential management
4. LaVague
Large Action Model framework to develop AI Web Agents
What sets it apart: vs Playwright/Selenium scripts: natural language objective → autonomous browser action via World Model + Action Engine architecture, no manual selector writing needed
Best for: Automating complex web workflows via natural language; QA teams building browser-based test automation with AI
5. BrowserGPT
Command your browser with GPT
What sets it apart: Uses GPT-4 to interpret natural language instructions and generate Playwright code for real-time browser control
Best for: natural-language-browser-automation; web-scraping-prototypes; ai-browser-interaction-research
6. Codel
✨ Fully autonomous AI Agent that can perform complicated tasks and projects using terminal, browser, and editor.
What sets it apart: vs Open Interpreter / ChatDev: automatic Docker image selection per task + integrated browser + editor in one autonomous agent — fully sandboxed execution with local LLM support via Ollama
Best for: Autonomous development tasks in sandboxed environments; Complex multi-step project automation; Web research integrated with code editing workflows
7. vimGPT
Browse the web with GPT-4V and Vimium
What sets it apart: vs DOM-based web agents: uses Vimium keyboard commands and pure vision (GPT-4V screenshots) for web interaction — no DOM parsing required, enabling navigation of any visual web content
Best for: Research into vision-based web browsing agents; Web research automation using visual understanding; Exploring multimodal AI interaction patterns
8. Tarsier
Vision utilities for web interaction agents 👀
What sets it apart: vs vision-language models for web tasks: OCR-to-text conversion enables text-only LLMs to outperform multimodal models by 10-20% on web interaction benchmarks — more accurate and cheaper than GPT-4V
Best for: Web automation agents needing visual element understanding; Enabling text-only LLMs to interact with web pages effectively; Building autonomous web agents with superior task performance
FAQ
- What are the best alternatives to Steel?
- The closest open-source alternatives to Steel are Browser-Use, Skyvern and Notte, followed by LaVague, BrowserGPT and Codel. They are ranked by how closely they match what Steel does.
- Which Steel alternative is the most popular?
- Browser-Use has the most GitHub stars among Steel alternatives, with 117,038 stars.
- Which Steel alternative is the most actively maintained?
- By recent activity, Skyvern (1,313 commits in the last 90 days) is the most actively developed alternative.