AI Engineer Guide

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

ResourceLink
Apphttps://operator.browserbase.com/
Source Codehttps://github.com/browserbase/open-operator
Licensestagehand - MIT, OpenOperator - MIT
Here is a quick demo of the app by Paul Klein IV (co-founder of Browserbase)

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)

ResourceLink
Source Codeweb-ui
LicenseMIT

Here is a quick demo of it by Addy Osmani

surf.new by Steel.dev

Similar to Browserbase, Steel.dev also provides browser as service. And surf.dev is a playground to the capabilities of their platform.

For the query

Compare Windsurf and Cursor. Give me the list of features that it provides and also cost and other things in markdown format

Here's the formatted markdown:

### Windsurf vs Cursor Comparison 

#### Windsurf
- Hobby Plan: Free
  - Includes:
    - Pro two-week trial
    - 2000 completions
    - 50 slow premium requests
- Pro Plan: $20/month
  - Everything in Hobby, plus:
    - Unlimited completions
    - 500 fast premium requests/month
    - Unlimited slow premium requests
    - 10 on-limit uses per day
- Business Plan: $40/user/month
  - Everything in Pro, plus:
    - Private privacy mode
    - 600+ video
    - Centralized team billing
    - Admin dashboard with usage stats
    - 30-day SOC2 ISO

#### Cursor
- Free Plan: $0/month, forever
  - Cascade credits:
    - Free one-time trial gift on download
    - 50 premium model User Prompt and 200 premium Flow Action credits
    - 5 premium model User Prompt credits
    - 5 premium model Flow Action credits
    - Access to Cascade Base model
- Pro Plan: $15/month
  - Cascade credits:
    - 500 premium model User Prompt credits
    - 1,500 premium model Flow Action credits
    - Can purchase more premium model credits
    - Priority unlimited access to Cascade Base Model
- Pro Ultimate Plan: $60/month
  - Cascade credits:
    - Infinite premium model User Prompt credits
    - 3,000 premium model Flow Action credits
    - Priority unlimited access to Cascade Base Model

2025-02-07 at 09.31.36@2x.png

ResourceLink
Appsurf.new
Source Code- steel-browser
- surf.new
License- steel-browser - Apache-2.0
- surf.new - MIT

Credits

The video demo in the blog post is from these Tweets

Happy automating browser!

#Bookmark #OpenAI #OpenAI-Operator #Browser-Base #Browser-Use #Chromium