Steel

Steel wraps headless Chromium instances behind a unified REST and Chrome DevTools Protocol gateway, running the browser sandbox inside a single Docker container. Built in TypeScript, the engine provides session persistence, proxy rotation, and live debugging for automated agents without an external cloud control plane. It exposes direct CDP endpoints alongside routes that convert web pages into markdown, screenshots, and PDFs.

Why Steel instead of Browserbase

Browserbase provides a managed cloud platform that abstracts browser fleets, executing sessions across its remote infrastructure. While that removes operational maintenance, dispatching dozens of rapid Chrome DevTools Protocol commands over the public internet to a third-party host introduces latency that compounds across multi-step agent loops. Steel runs directly within an organization's private network or Kubernetes cluster. Co-locating the browser container with the agent application drops command round-trips to local sub-millisecond network speeds, eliminating external ingress bottlenecks during high-frequency scraping.

Local deployment gives DevOps engineers direct control over CPU, memory, and Chromium flags, avoiding the noisy-neighbor throttling and concurrency limits of shared cloud tiers. In exchange, teams must handle process reclamation and memory bounds themselves, whereas Browserbase manages pool recycling automatically. Steel trades managed convenience for predictable throughput and zero per-minute meter fees.

What it does well

• Native CDP compatibility: Connects directly with Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium over standard WebSocket endpoints without rewriting existing automation scripts.
• Session and storage persistence: Retains cookies, tokens, and browser cache across sequential requests, enabling stateful agent navigation without repeated logins.
• Live session debugging: Provides a built-in web dashboard showing active browser sessions, network logs, and console output to inspect agent actions in real time.
• Single-request extraction: Converts web pages into LLM-ready markdown, full-page screenshots, or PDFs via dedicated /scrape, /screenshot, and /pdf endpoints.
• Embedded proxy and stealth controls: Applies IP rotation and fingerprint management during session creation, routing agent traffic through custom proxy pools.