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cdpfleet vs Steel

The open-source browser API for agents against a browser fleet: per-minute Chromium with proxies, captcha solves and a 15-minute-to-24-hour session cap by plan, or twelve real browsers metered per second with your own proxies. Prices, limits and features side by side.

Steel is the open-source browser API built for AI agents: a Chromium sandbox you reach over CDP with Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium, with rotating proxies, captcha solving, stealth configs, live session viewers and replays, Credentials for sign-ins, Browser Tools (scrape, screenshot and PDF in one call), a hosted MCP server and a cookbook of agent integrations. The core (steel-browser, Apache 2.0) can be self-hosted; Steel Cloud is the hosted version, billed by the minute. cdpfleet is a fleet of twelve real desktop browsers — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox and WebKit — launched with one HTTPS call and driven over the Playwright protocol from five languages, through proxies you bring. Both are "a browser in the cloud by the hour"; they differ on what the browser is, how long it may live, and what else comes in the box — including Steel's Browser Tools next to cdpfleet Functions, jobs and monitors.

cdpfleetSteel
Browsers12 — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox, WebKit. Chrome with stable, beta and dev channels and pinned previous majors; Camoufox with pinned versions.Chromium. A "Stealth Browser" tier is an Enterprise feature.
How you connectPlaywright protocol: chromium/firefox/webkit.connect(wsUrl) with the matching Playwright client (1.60; 1.52 for Rebrowser) — Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go. Or "cdp": true on the Chromium-based browsers for a cdpUrl: Puppeteer, connectOverCDP or any CDP client (CDP & Puppeteer).CDP WebSocket: Puppeteer, Playwright (Node and Python) via connectOverCDP, Selenium; SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go and Rust; REST Browser Tools for scrape, screenshot and PDF (below).
Session lengthUp to 24 h per session on every plan (shared threads: also capped by your remaining daily minutes). Idle timeout 120 s by default, up to 10 min on shared threads and 24 h on dedicated.5 minutes by default; the hard cap is set at creation and can't be extended: 15 minutes (Launch), 1 hour (Scale), up to 24 hours (Enterprise). Optional inactivityTimeout releases idle sessions early.
MeteringPer second, as thread-seconds: headless browser = 1 thread, headful = 2.Per minute, rounded up: $0.10/browser-hour (Launch), $0.08 (Scale), custom (Enterprise).
PlansFree Community plan: 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Paid from $7.50/month (5 shared threads, 60–480 browser-minutes a day per thread); dedicated threads for 24/7 use at $8.50/thread/month. Pricing.Launch: $0/month + usage, $30 one-time credits (valid 90 days), 10 concurrent, 60 API requests a minute. Scale: $250/month + usage, $100 credits/month, 100 concurrent, 600 requests a minute. Enterprise: custom, 1,000+ concurrent. On Launch, Steel's proxies and CAPTCHA solving need $10 of paid balance first (pricing-and-limits page; the proxy and CAPTCHA pages only say verification is required).
One browser-hourShared: $0.02–$0.05 at full use; dedicated $0.01. A browser running 24/7 is one dedicated thread, $8.50/month.$0.10 (Launch) or $0.08 (Scale) plus the plan fee. A browser running 24/7 would need a new session every 15–60 minutes and cost ≈ $58–$72/month in hours alone (Scale: + $250 plan fee).
ConcurrencyThe threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request); each session takes 1–4 threads by type.10 (Launch), 100 (Scale), 1,000+ (Enterprise); reserved browser pools on Enterprise.
ProxiesBring your own HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5 proxies — single, pool, or per-host rules (proxy_rules) — swap a running session's proxy live, see traffic per destination host and per rule; traffic through them is free. Or the cdpfleet residential proxy: 4 tiers from $0.50 to $5/GB from one prepaid balance ($5 free credit), mixable per host — e.g. Tier 4 for CDN assets, Tier 1 for pages. A launch without a proxy uses the free Community proxy — best effort, no guarantees.Built-in rotating residential proxies at $10/GB (Launch) or $6/GB (Scale), 200+ countries with state and city targeting; your own proxy (proxyUrl) with no Steel bandwidth charge; dedicated IPs $5/month each on Scale and Enterprise.
StealthReal browsers by default (genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…), headful by default, and three stealth builds — Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox — on every plan. See headless tells.Stealth configs on all plans; the dedicated Stealth Browser only on Enterprise.
Captcha solvingNot built in. Use any solver through Playwright.Built in: $3 per 1,000 solves (Launch), $1 per 1,000 (Scale). reCAPTCHA v2/v3, Turnstile, image and slider CAPTCHAs are solved; DataDome, Imperva, AWS WAF and FunCAPTCHA are detected but not solved.
Watching a sessionLive view with human takeover — Watch / Take control in the dashboard, or a link from the API — and Launch interactive: open any browser on a start page straight into live view from the dashboard's code generator (start_url over the API). Session recordings as MP4 (480p free, 720p or 1080p on a plan), and JPEG frames to your code with page.screencast.Live view (WebRTC, embeddable), every session recorded automatically with MP4/HLS replays, and agent traces synced to the video; data retained 7 days (Launch) or 14 days (Scale).
Persistence and sign-inPersistent profiles keep cookies, local storage and IndexedDB between sessions (paid plans); Playwright storageState; keep_alive to reconnect to the same browser on dedicated threads. No credential vault.Session contexts reusable across runs; Profiles that keep the whole user-data directory (300 MB, deleted after 30 days unused); Credentials API for stored logins and automatic sign-in (beta, free during the beta, not in self-hosted Steel).
Scraping in one callFunctions: screenshot, PDF, Markdown, scrape (HTML, Markdown, text, links, screenshot, XHR calls, cookies; wait_for, actions, extract by CSS selector), map, geo compare and a live tab — in a pooled browser, or in a browser and device of your choice on paid plans. Billed like a session (one thread while the call runs, one per country for geo compare); the Community proxy and your own proxies cost nothing extra. Free tools at /functions.Browser Tools: POST /v1/scrape returns HTML, cleaned HTML, Markdown or readability text, with metadata (title, Open Graph, JSON-LD, status code) and links in every response, and optionally a screenshot and a PDF from the same call. Its options are useProxy and delay — for actions or a specific country the docs point to a session. $5 per 1,000 calls on Launch and Scale, plus proxy traffic; 20 calls a minute per organization.
Crawling and bulkJobs on paid plans: batch (any number of URLs), crawl and map, with no size or time limit — runs continue past the 24-hour session limit by themselves; results as JSON lines or a zip archive, kept 14 days; stop and resume; signed webhooks. Plus watch (live XHR/WebSocket/DOM events), warmup and monitors (scheduled change detection with diffs).No crawl, map, batch or scheduling endpoint, and no webhooks documented. The cookbook schedules sessions or scrapes with Convex cron, Temporal or Trigger.dev, and calls a scrape's links "a ready-made frontier for a crawler".
Screenshots and PDFsScreenshot (PNG/JPEG, viewport or full page) and PDF Functions — a text PDF from a Chromium-based browser.Browser Tools: POST /v1/screenshot (PNG, viewport or full page) and POST /v1/pdf, each returning a hosted file that works without an API key for 7 days; $5 per 1,000 calls. The pricing page names only /scrape on that line; the pricing-and-limits page names all three.
Agent toolingA hosted MCP server at cdpfleet.com/mcp — add it in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and sign in with OAuth — or npx cdpfleet-mcp; SDKs for Node.js, Python and Go.A hosted MCP server (mcp.steel.dev/mcp, OAuth or API key) with scrape and session tools; a Commands API that drives a session over plain HTTP; mouse-and-keyboard computer-use input; a CLI; a large cookbook — Claude, OpenAI and Gemini computer use, browser-use, Stagehand, LangChain, CrewAI, Temporal and more; Files API.
Self-hostingNo — a managed fleet.Yes: steel-browser (Apache 2.0) runs in Docker locally or on your cloud.
Where the browser runsServers in the EU (Germany and Finland); your proxy decides where traffic exits.One region, us-east, by the session docs (a scrape recipe still shows other region values); proxies decide where traffic exits.
Examples89 cases run on production in five languages, all on GitHub with their output.steel-cookbook: over 90 examples across TypeScript, Python, Go and Rust, mostly agent-framework integrations.

Steel facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 9 November 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.

Which one, when

Pick Steel if…

  • You build agents and want proxies, captcha solving, Credentials and live view from one API with SDKs — or you want to self-host the same stack.
  • You use Selenium.
  • You want a page's HTML, Markdown, metadata, screenshot and PDF from one call at a flat $5 per 1,000.
  • Your sessions are short (minutes) and you prefer paying $0 up front plus usage.

Pick cdpfleet if…

  • You want one-call tasks with actions, a country and a choice of browser, or crawls, batch jobs and monitors without a scheduler of your own.
  • Your sessions run longer than Steel's cap for your plan — 15 minutes on Launch, an hour on Scale — or around the clock on dedicated threads.
  • Your site must see a specific real browser or version: Chrome beta/dev or a pinned major, Edge, Brave, Firefox, Camoufox, a stealth build on every plan.
  • You already pay for proxies and want per-host routing, live swaps and traffic accounting instead of per-GB fees.
  • You want per-second metering and Playwright clients in Java, C# or Go as well as Node.js and Python.
  • You want to start free — the Community plan includes proxies — and try a browser in live view before writing any code.

Try it

The quickstart is one HTTPS call and five lines of Playwright; the code builder writes the launch for any browser and option set in your language.

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