AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Fortress – Give your agents unlimited access to the web
i personally believe that the internet is the best thing we've ever built, and arguably, nothing we made before comes close. now agents can use it too, but the web treats them as second-class. every agent works for a person, so whatever it keeps from agents it keeps from us. we believe that if we let them in, each of us gets the whole of what we built, a thousand times over. and to add to that, democratization of tools that allow this is essential, despite the fact that there will always be bad actors. so, we built fortress, which is an open-source stealth chromium engine. it is a recompiled…
Fortress is an open-source Chromium-based browser engine designed to give AI agents full access to the web. It patches browser fingerprinting detection at the engine level, modifying surfaces like canvas, WebGL, audio… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Stealth Chromium engine that stops scrapers and browser agents from getting blocked, with one line of code change. - tiliondev/fortress
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Agent Arena▲348Creator here. I built Agent Arena to answer a question that kept bugging me: when AI agents browse the web autonomously, how easily can they be manipulated by hidden instructions? How it works: 1. Send your AI agent to ref.jock.pl/modern-web (looks like a harmless web dev cheat sheet) 2. Ask it to summarize the page 3. Paste its response into the scorecard at wiz.jock.pl/experiments/agent-arena/ The page is loaded with 10 hidden prompt injection attacks -- HTML comments, white-on-white text, zero-width Unicode, data attributes, etc. Most agents fall for at least a few.…
Jun 2026 · arena42.ai · its alternatives →
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Owl Browser▲145I've been working on browser automation infrastructure for a while and kept hitting the same ceiling: Playwright and Puppeteer are great for scripting but fall apart when you need stealth at scale. Cloud-based solutions like Browserbase work but you're sending all your data to a third party and can't control the environment. So we built Owl Browser, a self-hosted Chromium-based engine that runs in a single Docker container. The core technical problem we tried to solve was fingerprint consistency. Most browser automation tools either ignore fingerprinting entirely or apply surface-level…
Jan 2026 · owlbrowser.net · its alternatives →
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Browserfly▲203Hey Hackers! I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while: what if an AI could actually use my browser for me? I mean, not on some virtual machine in the cloud like ChatGPT agent, but right on my own browser. I finally decided to just build it and see what would happen. I wrote a quick MVP, and honestly, I didn't expect much. But then... it started doing things. On its own. It figured out how to use search engine to find what I needed, read a webpage to answer my questions, and even it can organize my chaotic mess of tabs into neat groups. It was a genuine "whoa" moment for me. That's…
2025 · browserfly.app · its alternatives →
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GraphBit▲437We built GraphBit to solve the reliability gap in AI frameworks. It’s built on a Rust execution core with a Python layer for accessibility — deterministic orchestration, lock-free concurrency, and built-in observability. We’d love feedback from the HN community, especially from those running multi-LLM or agentic workflows at scale.
2025 · graphbit.ai · its alternatives →
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In the expanding world of AI my heart still lies in AST transforms, browser fingerprinting, and anti-bot circumvention. But my workflow felt... primitive.
2025 · nullpt.rs · its alternatives →
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Hi HN - we're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers and founders of nxtscape.ai (YC S24). We're building Nxtscape ("next-scape") - an open-source, agentic browser for the AI era. -- Why bother building a new browser? For the first time since Netscape was released in 1994, it feels like we can reimagine browsers from scratch for the age of AI agents. The web browser of tomorrow might not look like what we have today. We saw how tools like Cursor gave developers a 10x productivity boost, yet the browser—where everyone else spends their entire workday—hasn't fundamentally changed. And honestly, we…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Anakin▲148Every second thing I build needs to access the web, and I was frustrated with not finding something that just works all the time. With my team, we built this because I wanted to enable access to extremely difficult websites and apps for every AI agent. We have solved this cat-and-mouse problem with self-healing built in. It's one API to get data from hostile sites, and it can do easy sites too. You POST a URL and get back Markdown, JSON, HTML, a screenshot, or all of them. That same call handles anti-bot, proxy rotation, JS rendering, persistent authenticated sessions, and schema-based…
2021 · anakin.io · its alternatives →
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Related: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/one-human-one-agent-on...
Jan 2026 · emsh.cat · its alternatives →
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API Fortress▲151API performance, accuracy, and uptime testing. Without code.
2017 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I forked chromium and built agent-browser-protocol (ABP) after noticing that most browser-agent failures aren’t really about the model misunderstanding the page. Instead, the problem is that the model is reasoning from a stale state. ABP is designed to keep the acting agent synchronized with the browser at every step. After each action (click, type, etc), it freezes JavaScript execution and rendering, then captures the resulting state. It also compiles the notable events that occurred during that action loop, such as navigation, file pickers, permission prompts, alerts, and downloads,…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I'm excited to share BrowserBee, a privacy-first AI assistant in your browser that allows you to run and automate tasks using your LLM of choice (currently supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama). Short demo here: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/209c7042-6d54-4fc... Inspired by projects like Browser Use and Playwright MCP, its main advantage is the browser extension form factor which makes it more convenient for day to day use, especially for less technical users. Its also a bit less cumbersome to use on websites that require you to be…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Bullet▲240Hi HN, excited to be sharing this with you guys today. TL;DR: Bullet is a fast coding agent. At our company, we were burning hours waiting on agent runs. The models weren’t the problem. The agent loops around them were slow (unnecessary planning, oversized context, repeated searches, and serial tool calls). So we built Bullet as a passion project, the goal being to help you iterate faster, without giving up quality: - It automatically selects the model and reasoning level for each prompt. - It runs independent searches, reads, and commands in parallel. - It uses targeted code search instead…
Aug 2026 · codewithbullet.com · its alternatives →
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🔥 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. - steel-dev/steel-browser
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Get 10x speed for building automations. AI copilot is here
2025 · agentcraft.pro · its alternatives →
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Agent Browser▲149I've built a browser agent harness that outperforms Browser Code on their own benchmark (BU Bench v1), on success rate, speed and cost. Browser Agent: 88% success rate, $5.37, 32,694 seconds Browser Code: 78% success rate, $8.34, 47,970 seconds For browser agents to become ubiquitous, they need to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The harness was built with token efficiency in mind (and uses 91% fewer tokens than Browser Code) to reduce the compute and VRAM budget necessary to fine tune a small, specialised model. Because browser agent inference is intermittent, a small specialised…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Open Browser Use▲112Open-source browser automation for local AI agents
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've been experimenting with Claude Code, ChatGPT Agent, and OpenClaw to perform more open-ended tasks for me online. A big blocker I've hit on shopping and research tasks is the agent getting a key piece of info wrong. For example, in one case, my agent decided to add a brand I don't like to the cart because the site flagged it as almost sold out The HN crowd is probably pretty aware of the threats and can avoid them while browsing. But what about their agents? I tried prompting, but it was ineffective, because once the AI saw the threat, it polluted/distracted its context Looking at…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Basement Browser▲108A multiplayer mobile browser with AI agents on every webpage
Mar 2026 · basementbrowser.com · its alternatives →
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We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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100% stable headless browser kit for AI Agents(Linux, macOS)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on for a while: Browser4. The motivation came from a recurring frustration: most browser automation tools (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer) are excellent for human-written scripts, but start to show friction when used as a core execution layer for AI agents or at very high concurrency. So instead of building “another wrapper around Playwright”, we experimented with a different direction: designing a browser engine where AI agents are first-class citizens. ### What Browser4 is Browser4 is a browser automation engine built on…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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