Pick Stagehand if
developers who already write Playwright and want self-healing prompts on top.
Read the Stagehand pageStagehand vs Steel
Our take
Pick Stagehand if developers who already write Playwright and want self-healing prompts on top. Pick Steel if agent authors who want a CDP endpoint with proxies and session replay. Skip Stagehand if people who want a hosted no-code agent (Manus) or a scrape-to-markdown API (Firecrawl). Skip Steel if people who want a hosted general agent (Manus) or markdown-out scrape credits (Firecrawl).
Best for
Stagehand Drive a page with natural-language primitives
Steel Attach Playwright to a stealth cloud session
Free plan
Stagehand $0 · mIT. You bring a model key and Chrome
Steel $0 · /month + usage. $30 one-time credits (~300 browser hours). 10 concurrent; 15-minute sessions; 3 seats
Lowest paid
Stagehand Developer $20/mo
Steel Scale $250/mo
Next step up
Stagehand Startup $99/mo
Steel
Coding agent
Stagehand
Steel CLI + agent skill
Watch out
Stagehand Local is free
Steel Launch credits are one-time
Last checked
Stagehand 2026-10-22 · browserbase.com/pricing
Steel 2026-10-22 · steel.dev/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Steel if
agent authors who want a CDP endpoint with proxies and session replay.
Read the Steel page