The basics
Steel is cloud browser infrastructure for AI agents. It gives agents isolated cloud browser sessions with built-in anti-bot stealth, CAPTCHA solving and session persistence.
Yes. Steel Browser is the open-source server on GitHub that you can host yourself. Steel Cloud is the managed version, adding scale, stealth, proxies and CAPTCHA solving.
Steel is infrastructure, not an agent. Your agent, built with the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain, CrewAI or your own code, connects to Steel, which handles the browser's lifecycle, stealth, session persistence and proxies.
Using Steel
Yes. Steel works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium and its own Node and Python SDKs. You connect over a standard CDP WebSocket URL, so any CDP-compatible tool works out of the box.
Under a second on average, with no cold-start penalty. Each session launches into its own isolated Chromium in the cloud, with its proxy, cookies and storage already set up.
Yes. Steel runs managed cloud browser sessions for scraping and AI automation, and handles anti-bot stealth, CAPTCHA solving, residential proxies and session persistence in one API, through Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium.
Yes. A live session viewer lets people watch or take over running sessions. Persistent browser profiles keep cookies and session tokens, so agents pick up signed-in workflows without logging in again.
Pricing
Steel is priced monthly by concurrent sessions, with proxies and stealth included and no per-request or idle-time fees. Steel Browser is free and open source. See steel.dev/pricing for plans.