AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Steel.dev – An open-source browser API for AI agents and apps
🔥 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
Steel.dev is an open-source browser API designed for AI agents and applications. It enables developers to build AI systems that can interact with web browsers programmatically. The tool is built for developers creating… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Steel.dev – An open-source browser API for AI agents and apps launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Context.dev▲814Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.
Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →
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21st.dev▲1,211I originally built this app to organize and reuse interesting React + Tailwind components I came across on Twitter, inspired by the shadcn/ui approach. Later, a friend started contributing their own components, and it got me thinking—this could grow into something bigger, like an NPM for design engineers to share and use components. Would love to hear your thoughts!
2025 · 21st.dev · its alternatives →
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Asteroid▲673AI browser agents for your back office, built in seconds
2025 · asteroid.ai · its alternatives →
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BrowserAgent▲544Browser-based AI agents - unlimited runs, fixed cost
2025 · browser-use.com · its alternatives →
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display.dev▲183Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…
May 2026 · display.dev · its alternatives →
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Layouts.dev▲699A notebook for building interfaces with Tailwind & shadcn/UI
2024 · layouts.dev · its alternatives →
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Anything API▲656Hey HN! We built Notte, a browser infrastructure and agents platform. Many of our users automate UI workflows or extract data from sites that don’t have APIs. In practice, we noticed that once an agent understands how a site works, parts of the task can often run without a browser by interacting with the same network requests the site uses. So we built Anything API: describe a browser task, and our agent explores the site, builds a function, tests it against your description, and deploys a callable REST endpoint. No infra to manage. How the build works: - Describe the task (best results come…
Mar 2026 · anything.notte.cc · 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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2024 · webcrumbs.org · 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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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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Help stop the confusion regarding "Open" AI. Contribute to zaporter/OpenAI-is-not-Open development by creating an account on GitHub.
2023 · github.com · 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, We’ve been building browser agents for a while. In production, we kept converging on the same pattern: deterministic scripts for the happy path, agents only for edge cases. So we built Demonstrate Mode. The idea is simple: You perform your workflow once in a remote browser. Notte records the interactions and generates deterministic automation code. How it works: - Record clicks, inputs, navigations in a cloud browser - Compile them into deterministic code (no LLM at runtime) - Run and deploy on managed browser infrastructure Closest analog is Playwright codegen but: - Infrastructure…
2025 · notte.cc · its alternatives →
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Atomic▲140Hey HN, I’ve been building Atom (https://github.com/rush86999/atom), an open-source, self-hosted AI automation platform. I built this because while tools like OpenClaw are excellent for one-off scripts and personal tasks, I found them difficult to use for complex business workflows (e.g., managing invoices or SaaS ops). The main issue was State Blindness: the agent would fire a command and assume it worked, without "seeing" if the UI or state actually updated. I just shipped a new architecture to solve this called Canvas AI Accessibility. The Technical Concept: Instead of…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Browserbasefree tier, from $20/mo▲60A web browser for your AI
2025 · browserbase.com · its alternatives →
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From concept to web app in minutes, fine-tune in TypeScript
2023 · contember.com · its alternatives →
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I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →