Steel Browser

What is Steel Browser?

Steel provides browser infrastructure for AI agents, scrapers and test tooling. A Sessions API starts a real browser in under a second, and you connect to it with Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium. Sessions can keep cookies and tabs so an agent resumes signed in, persistent profiles carry logins across runs, and a live session viewer lets a person watch or take over. Steel Cloud adds CAPTCHA solving, residential proxies, stealth options, browser tools such as scrape, screenshot and PDF, and readable traces for debugging. The Steel Browser project is free and open source on GitHub if you prefer to run it yourself. Steel pricing is usage based: Launch is $0 per month plus usage with $30 in one-time credits, Scale is $250 per month plus usage with $100 in monthly credits, and Enterprise is custom. Browser hours cost $0.10 on Launch and $0.08 on Scale.

Use cases

• Give an AI agent a real browser
• Run Playwright or Puppeteer scripts in the cloud
• Scrape sites that need logins and JavaScript
• Solve CAPTCHAs during automation
• Keep login state across sessions
• Run end-to-end browser tests
• Monitor prices across retailers

Who it's for

• AI agent developers
• Automation engineers
• Backend developers
• Web scraping developers

Why use Steel Browser

• You can try Steel Cloud without a subscription, using $30 in credits and no card.
• Pricing is metered by browser hours, proxy bandwidth, CAPTCHA solves and tool calls, with a dashboard that shows spend per meter.
• Existing Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium scripts connect with a small change.
• Persistent profiles and session resume keep agents signed in across runs.
• The open-source Steel Browser lets you inspect the code and self-host if you need to.

Steel Browser features

• Sessions API that starts a browser in under a second
• Playwright, Puppeteer and Selenium compatibility
• Resume sessions with the same cookies and tabs
• Persistent browser profiles
• CAPTCHA solving including Cloudflare Turnstile
• Managed proxies and dedicated IPs
• Browser tools: scrape, screenshot and PDF
• Live session viewer and readable agent traces
• Stealth Browser, a custom Chromium fork, on Enterprise
• Open-source Steel Browser with self-hosting

Steel Browser integrations

• Playwright
• Puppeteer
• Selenium
• OpenAI Agents SDK
• LangChain
• CrewAI

How to get started with Steel Browser

1. Sign up for Steel Cloud and get an API key, or run the open-source Steel Browser yourself.
2. Create a session through the Sessions API, optionally turning on CAPTCHA solving.
3. Connect Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium to the session over its WebSocket endpoint.
4. Drive the browser from your agent or script, using proxies, profiles and browser tools as needed.
5. Review the live viewer and traces, and watch usage by meter in the dashboard.

Steel Browser limitations

• Launch allows 10 concurrent sessions, 15-minute sessions and 60 requests per minute
• Launch free credits are one-time, valid for 90 days
• CAPTCHA solving and Steel proxies on Launch need a $10 paid deposit to verify the account
• Stealth Browser, reserved pools and Enterprise SSO are Enterprise only
• Self-hosting means you run and maintain the infrastructure

Steel Browser pricing

Yes, Steel Browser has a free plan. Paid plans start at $250 per month, according to the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026.

Steel Browser plans

• Launch

  $0 per month + usage

  $30 of credits, one time

  • 10 concurrent browser sessions
  • Sessions up to 15 minutes
  • Up to 3 seats
  • Email and community support
  • No credit card needed

• Scale

  $250 per month + usage

  includes $100 of credits every month

  • 100 concurrent browser sessions
  • Sessions up to 1 hour
  • Dedicated IPs at $5 each
  • Dedicated Slack channel
  • HIPAA-ready BAA

• Enterprise

  Custom

  • 1,000+ concurrent sessions
  • Stealth browser
  • Reserve browser pools
  • Sessions up to 24 hours
  • Support and uptime SLAs
  • Enterprise SSO

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

Steel Browser alternatives

The main Steel Browser alternatives listed on Debuly are Browserbase, Hyperbrowser, Playwright, Browser Use, Spider and Lovelace. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   Browser Use

   Cloud browsers and hosted web agents for AI, plus an MIT-licensed open-source browser agent, billed pay-as-you-go from $0.02 per hour.

   Developer platformsAutomation and agentsCoding
   PaidVisit Browser Use (official site)
2. 

   Browserbase

   Cloud platform of headless browsers, search and fetch APIs and agent runtime for building AI agents that browse and act on the web.

   Developer platformsAutomation and agentsCoding
   FreemiumVisit Browserbase (official site)
3. 

   Hyperbrowser

   Cloud infrastructure that gives AI agents hosted Chrome sessions, isolated sandboxes, and web fetch, crawl and search APIs.

   Developer platformsAutomation and agentsCoding
   FreemiumVisit Hyperbrowser (official site)
4. 

   Lovelace

   Lovelace builds Elemental, a context engine that turns enterprise data into knowledge graphs for AI agents.

   Developer platformsAutomation and agentsResearch and search
   Contact salesVisit Lovelace (official site)
5. 

   Playwright

   Open-source Microsoft framework for end-to-end web testing and browser automation across Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, with CLI and MCP for agents.

   Developer platformsCodingAutomation and agents
   Open sourceVisit Playwright (official site)
6. 

   Spider

   Web crawling and scraping API with cloud browsers and residential proxies, billed per request, for AI agents and data pipelines.

   Developer platformsAutomation and agentsResearch and search
   PaidVisit Spider (official site)

Steel Browser FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from steel.dev · fetched 24 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

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