Steel.dev
Open-source browser API for AI agents: sandboxed Chrome sessions via Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium.
About
Steel.dev is an open-source (Apache 2.0) browser API built for AI agents and web automation. Its core unit is a sandboxed Chrome session with isolated state, cookies, anti-detection, and a live session viewer. Developers connect with Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium while Steel handles session management, proxy chains, cookie persistence, fingerprint management, and resource cleanup.
It can be self-hosted via Docker or used as the managed Steel Cloud tier, and it exposes quick actions to convert pages to markdown or readable text, take screenshots, and generate PDFs. Documentation cites integrations with Claude Computer Use, Gemini and OpenAI computer-use, LangGraph, CrewAI, Pydantic AI, and the Vercel AI SDK. A third-party snapshot reported roughly 6,700 GitHub stars.
Limitations: the project is in public beta and evolving, so APIs may churn; anti-detection features work well but no hosted browser service is bulletproof against advanced bot detection.
What it can do
- Sandboxed Chrome sessions with persistent state and cookies
- Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium connectivity via CDP
- Anti-detection, proxy chains, and extension loading
- Markdown/PDF/screenshot quick actions plus live session viewer
Setup
Self-host with Docker (docker run) or sign up for Steel Cloud; connect via Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium using the session endpoint.
Prerequisites
Docker for self-hosting, or a Steel Cloud account.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 80; Trending score 80/100 from researcher assessment.
★ 6,768 GitHub stars
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.