Breaking

Five open-source projects offer competing ways for AI agents to use a browser

September 29, 2026 at 16:17 EDT

AI Agents
Open Source
Software Dev & Coding

Open-source developers now have five competing ways to let an AI agent use a browser, and the projects do not do the same job. As of September 29, 2026, Browser Use has 116,737 GitHub stars. Stagehand has 25,463, Skyvern 23,095, LaVague 6,389, and AgentQL 1,470.

September 29, 2026 · Browser agents

Five ways to hand an agent a browser

Browser Use, Stagehand, Skyvern, LaVague, and AgentQL are all open source. They do not give an agent the same kind of control, license, or upkeep.

GitHub stars, to scale

Browser Use is several times the rest

Column height matches star count on September 29, 2026. Browser Use is about 4.6 times Stagehand and about 79 times AgentQL.

116,737

Browser Use

25,463

Stagehand

23,095

Skyvern

6,389

LaVague

1,470

AgentQL

Cost per solved task

17 cents versus $3.40 is 20 times

Height is money, not accuracy, on Browser Use's 106-task Internal Bench Hard. The cheaper run also reports the higher success rate.

$0.17

Browser Use · 82% success

$3.40

Opus 5 · 62% success

Takeaway: one block is the reported cost of a solved Browser Use task; twenty blocks are the reported Opus 5 cost on the same bench.

Shared loop

Read, decide, act, check

1 · Read the page

→

2 · Choose an action

→

3 · Run it

→

4 · Check the result

Browser Use lets the model own step 2. Stagehand and AgentQL keep that choice in application code. Skyvern plans the workflow. LaVague splits it between a World Model and an Action Engine.

What holds up

Control is a real choice

Autonomous runs and step-by-step code both ship. Cloud browsers are listed at $0.02 an hour. Self-healing language actions target layout changes that break old selectors. Four of the five repos were updated in September 2026.

What does not

Blocks, licenses, silence

CAPTCHA solving is not guaranteed. Skyvern's anti-bot layer stays in the cloud, and the repo is AGPL-3.0. LaVague's last push was January 21, 2025. Historical WebVoyager scores are not a fair ranking.

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