Steel Browser

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

A self-hostable browser API that runs Chrome sessions with stored cookies, proxies and extensions, which you connect to with Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium, plus a session viewer.

Adopt it when

You want to run your own pool of remote browser sessions for agents or scrapers instead of paying for a hosted browser service.

Watch out

Releases are still tagged beta, and the company's hosted Steel cloud gets features first, so the open-source server can lag.

Ready for

Usable

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service

Built with

TypeScript, Fastify, Puppeteer and Chrome

How established

Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v0.5.5-beta.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Steel Browser → TypeScript → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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