Open Source Alternatives to OpenAI Operator

Operator is one of the interesting feature that is released by OpenAI recently. It has the capabilities to access to remote browser (with internet) and can perform task for you. Under the hood it uses Computer-Using Agent

Though I didn’t get access to try it myself, the demo that is presented by the OpenAI team looks promising.

Essentially it works by passing the screenshot and asking the LLM for next action. You can have a look at their system prompt

Here are some of the open source alternative to OpenAI Operator that mimics browser searching capabilities

Open Operator by Browserbase

It’s an PoC application built by the Browserbase team to show how someone can leverage their open source library Stagehand and their hosted browser as service - Browserbase

The app itself is built on Next.js and currently supports only OpenAI’s gpt-4o model

You can learn about how they’re prompting and interacting with stagehand+Browserbase here

Note: I tried it with couple of queries and in some case it was kind of slow and got killed before getting the result (session timeout maybe?). Given that this is just a PoC not an application like OpenAI’s Operator it is so 🙌. I really like their slick UI.

Web UI by Browser Use

Similar to OpenOperator, this in built on top of browser-use - a open source, MIT licensed library for building AI agents to perform some action on the browser.

In terms of the tech stack, the app is built using gradio. Unlike OpenOperator, it has support for multiple LLM like Gemini, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Ollama, etc.

And it also have lot of extra customisability as well (eg: Persistent Browser Sessions)

Here is a quick demo of it by Addy Osmani

Credits

The video demo in the blog post is from these Tweets

• https://x.com/pk_iv/status/1882837641521221858
• https://x.com/addyosmani/status/1878245455223767314

Happy automating browser!