Browser Use vs Steel
Both rent you cloud browsers for AI agents. Browser Use adds a hosted agent you send tasks to, with stealth and residential proxies on by default, while Steel is a browser API with ready-made tooling and an open-source runtime you can host yourself.
The companies and products
Browser Use
Browser Use makes the popular open-source browser-agent library and runs Browser Use Cloud, a service of managed browsers and a hosted agent that uses them.
Browser Use Cloud is a different kind of product from bochka: you get a hardened Chromium browser in their cloud that you drive over CDP with Playwright or Puppeteer, or a hosted agent that you send tasks to through an API. It comes with stealth fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies, and you pay per browser-hour. It is built for teams that need many browsers that get past anti-bot checks, not a machine to run their own code on.
Steel
Steel is an API that runs fleets of cloud browsers for AI agents: you create a session, connect Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium, and release it when done.
Each Steel session is a headful Chromium in a VM in Steel's cloud, driven over CDP or through a computer-use input API, with a live viewer you can embed. Around it Steel sells managed proxies, CAPTCHA solving, saved browser profiles, a credentials vault that signs in for the agent, a files API and readable traces. It is a different kind of product from bochka: a managed browser, not a general sandbox, so this page compares where the two overlap, which is agents that use a browser.
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “3rd cheapest of 367” means 2 of the other 366 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | Browser Use: price rank | Steel: price rank | bochka: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Neither gives you a shell, so builds, Docker and tests need another machine; bochka gives each agent a full VM for that. | 48th of 367, with limits $301 a month | 124th of 367, with limits $1,115 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An agent that runs all month hits Browser Use's 4-hour stop and Steel's 1-hour cap on Scale, so both must restart sessions again and again. | 63rd of 366, with limits $750 a month | 238th of 366, with limits $3,070 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month | 216th of 345, with limits $71 a month | 264th of 345, with limits $333 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month 300 sandboxes at once is more than Steel's Scale limit of 100 browsers, and on both each user gets a browser rather than a machine. | 199th of 361, with limits $270 a month | 244th of 361, with limits $990 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 227th of 360, with limits $1,010 a month | 257th of 360, with limits $4,150 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 226th of 364, with limits $90 a month | 348th of 364, with limits $400 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month CI needs a shell, Docker and a known CPU size, which neither browser service offers, so both are a compromise here. | 219th of 377, with limits $64 a month | 239th of 377, with limits $120 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 212th of 368, with limits $25 a month | 241st of 368, with limits $73 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Both drive a browser only; bochka streams a 60fps Linux desktop where a computer-use agent can open any app, not just Chromium. | 83rd of 369, with limits $133 a month | 148th of 369, with limits $367 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month This is home ground for both: Browser Use ranks 3rd and Steel ranks 25th, and bochka ranks 7th by putting Chromium on a full VM where the agent can also run code. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $140 a month | 25th cheapest of 367 $470 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month At startup scale Browser Use ranks 14th and Steel ranks 56th; bochka ranks 6th by running the scraper, its queue and its database on the same machine. | 14th cheapest of 346 $198 a month | 56th cheapest of 346 $540 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month Browser Use ranks 1st for mass scraping because stealth, fingerprints and residential proxies come on by default; Steel ranks 9th and keeps its stealth browser for Enterprise. | Cheapest of 338 $2,950 a month | 9th of 338, with limits $7,950 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 50th of 360, with limits $68 a month | 220th of 360, with limits $242 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Browser Use | Steel | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Managed cloud browsers over CDP, plus a hosted browser agent you send tasks to | A headful Chromium per session in a VM, driven over CDP or a computer-use input API | A full Linux VM with its own kernel and root, with a desktop and Chromium inside |
| Hosted agent | Their own browser agent with a choice of models, a session queue and an events API | No hosted agent; a CLI, skills and an MCP server give your own agent a Steel browser | Seven coding agents preinstalled, including Claude Code and Codex, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Shell, code and Docker | No shell on the machine running the browser | No shell; you reach the browser through CDP and the REST API | SSH, root, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Session length | Agent browsers stop after 4 hours; idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes | 15 minutes on Launch, 1 hour on Scale, up to 24 hours on Enterprise | No session cap on paid plans |
| State between sessions | Browser profiles keep cookies and logins; workspaces sync up to 950 MiB of files | Files API keeps session files; profiles keep cookies and logins (300 MB, deleted after 30 days unused) | The whole disk is saved every minute and on stop; fork a running sandbox |
| Machine size | Not published; billed per browser-hour | Not published; billed per browser hour | 4 vCPU / 8 GB by default, up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB by plan |
| Stealth and CAPTCHAs | Hardened Chromium fork, stealth on by default, per-session fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving (off in the EU) | CAPTCHA solving on paid plans; a stealth browser on Enterprise only | Chromium on datacenter IPs; no fingerprint rotation or CAPTCHA solving |
| Proxies | Residential proxies in 195+ countries, on by default, or bring your own | Managed residential proxies on paid plans, your own proxy on every plan, dedicated IPs on Scale | None managed; you can run your own proxy client inside the VM |
| Live view and computer use | Embeddable live view of the browser for review or takeover, plus a recording | Embeddable live view with human takeover, a computer-use input API, mobile mode and traces | A full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, or Chrome alone; computer use beyond the browser |
| Secrets | Secrets typed into the page by alias; the model never sees them, but the browser does | Credentials API (beta) stores web logins and signs in without showing the agent the password | Credentials proxy: real keys never enter the sandbox, for any HTTPS API |
| Browsers at once | 10 to 1,000, rising with a project's lifetime payments | 10 on Launch, 100 on Scale, 1,000+ on Enterprise | 300 at once fit in the user-sandbox scenario; starts above 90 a minute are queued |
| Hosting | No way to serve your own ports | No inbound ports; a CDP websocket and a live view URL | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Open source and self-hosting | The browser-use agent library is MIT and runs on your own machine | steel-browser runtime is Apache-2.0 and runs in Docker; Steel Outpost runs inside your network | Managed cloud only |
| Regions | US, plus an EU deployment in Frankfurt with a smaller feature set | us-east only; proxy location sets the visible IP | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Browser Use | Steel | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | No | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | No | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | No | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | No | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | No | Yes |
| Pause/resume | No | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | No | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Not published | No | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | No | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Not published | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | No | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes | No |
| BYOC | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | Yes | Yes | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | No | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | No | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Yes | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either. Browser Use and Steel sell browser-hours, do not publish the CPU or memory behind a session, and are not in the CPU benchmark. bochka scored 26.69 runs per second on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js test at 4 vCPU / 8 GB; Steel says a session starts in under a second.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Browser Use and Steel have no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | Browser Use, a month | Steel, a month | bochka, a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $7 · Pay as you go · with limits | $250 · Scale · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $25 · Pay as you go · with limits | $250 · Scale · with limits | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $178 · Spend tier 50 · with limits | $784 · Scale · with limits | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $150 · Spend tier 500 · with limits | $510 · Scale · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $210 · Spend tier 1000 · with limits | $950 · Scale · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Browser Use: Browser Use bills $0.02 per browser-hour, rounded up to whole minutes, from prepaid credits that never expire, with no subscription. Proxy traffic is extra ($5 per GB through the residential proxy, which is on by default), and agent runs add model tokens.
Steel: Steel bills browser hours by the minute, rounded up: $0.10 an hour on the free Launch plan and $0.08 on Scale, which costs $250 a month and includes $100 of usage. Proxy bandwidth, CAPTCHA solves and browser tools are billed on top.
Steel: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second while a sandbox runs. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
No scenario in the table fits Browser Use or Steel as written, because each asks for a general machine and both sell a browser session with no shell, of a size they do not publish. Browser Use agent browsers stop after 4 hours, and Steel sessions after 1 hour on Scale, so the workday and always-on agents must be split into many sessions. Browser Use raises concurrency with lifetime payments (50 browsers need $200 paid, 1,000 need $25,000), while Steel caps Scale at 100 browsers at once, so 300 user sandboxes and 1,000 short jobs need Enterprise. bochka fits every scenario except 1,000 short jobs at once, where its starts are queued.
| Scenario | Browser Use | Steel | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays |
|
| None that bite |
| One agent that never stops |
|
| None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel |
|
| None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users |
|
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Browser Use when
you want to hand a hosted agent tasks in plain words, or need many cheap browser-hours on sites with strong bot checks, with stealth and residential proxies on by default.
- A browser agent as a service. For teams that want to send a task in plain words and get a result back, without running an agent themselves.
- Stealth on by default. For sites with strong bot checks: hardened Chromium, fresh fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies on every account.
- Longer sessions without a plan. For jobs of a few hours: agent browsers run up to 4 hours on pay as you go, and there is an EU deployment.
Use Steel when
you want a browser API your own agent drives, with saved logins, human takeover and traces, or an open-source browser you can host on your own machines.
- Run it yourself. For teams whose browsers must run on their own machines: steel-browser is Apache-2.0, and Steel Outpost runs inside your network.
- Ready-made browser tooling. For agents that sign in and hand off: a credentials vault, saved profiles, human takeover, mobile mode and readable traces.
- Day-long sessions and fixed IPs. For long browser runs and allowlisted sites: sessions up to 24 hours on Enterprise and dedicated IPs on Scale.
Where bochka fits
Browser Use and Steel are both built for agents whose whole job is a browser. If what you are really running is an agent that browses and then also writes code, runs tools or serves an app, bochka gives it a whole Linux machine with Chromium and a desktop inside. Keep Browser Use or Steel for heavy proxied scraping, and look at bochka when the browser is only one part of the work.
A whole machine around the browser
Neither Browser Use nor Steel gives you a shell, so the agent's code, files and Docker run on a second machine you manage, wire up and pay for. A bochka sandbox is a full VM with root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
No session cap, and nothing lost
Browser Use agent browsers stop at 4 hours and Steel sessions at 1 hour on Scale, so long jobs are cut up and rebuilt from saved profiles. bochka has no cap on paid plans, saves the disk every minute and can fork a running sandbox.
Any agent, driven from outside, with keys kept out
Browser Use runs only its own browser agent and types secrets into the page; Steel hosts no agent and its vault covers web logins. bochka ships seven coding agents you drive from outside, and its credentials proxy covers any HTTPS API.
Use bochka when your agent does more than browse: it needs a shell, files, Docker, a desktop or a server next to the browser, and it has to keep working for hours or days. Compare it one to one: bochka vs Browser Use and bochka vs Steel.
Questions people ask
Is Browser Use cheaper than Steel?
Per browser-hour, yes: $0.02 against $0.08 to $0.10 on Steel. In the table Browser Use comes out lower in all five scenarios, for example $178 against $784 for 50 agents in parallel, partly because Steel needs its $250 Scale plan for sessions over 15 minutes. Neither fits those scenarios as a general machine.
Which is faster, Browser Use or Steel?
There is no comparable measurement. Neither publishes the CPU or memory behind a session, and neither is in the CPU benchmark. Steel says a session starts in under a second.
Can Browser Use or Steel run Docker?
No. Both give you a cloud browser with no shell, so Docker and the agent's own code must run somewhere else. A bochka sandbox is a full VM with Docker, systemd and root.
How long can a session run on each?
Browser Use agent browsers have a 4-hour hard timeout and idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes. Steel sessions last up to 15 minutes on Launch, 1 hour on Scale and 24 hours on Enterprise. bochka has no session cap on paid plans.
Which is better at getting past bot checks?
Browser Use turns stealth on for everyone: a hardened Chromium fork, per-session fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving in the US and residential proxies by default. Steel has residential proxies and CAPTCHA solving on paid plans and keeps its stealth browser for Enterprise. bochka runs Chromium on datacenter IPs.
Can I self-host Browser Use or Steel?
Steel's steel-browser runtime is Apache-2.0 and runs in Docker, and Steel Outpost runs Steel inside your own network. Browser Use's agent library is MIT and runs on your machine, but its stealth cloud browser is a hosted service.
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