Comparison

There are many browser-automation and AI-browser tools. This page puts them side by side and compares them honestly — from classic frameworks to agent browsers to cloud and consumer products. Where a number can be measured, we measure it. The comparison is living; verdicts update each round.

In one line

chrome-use drives your existing, real Chrome — your profile, your extensions, your logins, no new browser to install. It's a native CLI for AI agents: accessibility-tree snapshots + compact @refs, usable by any agent that can run a shell, with stealth / anti-detection built in. Most tools either spin up a separate browser or ask you to switch browsers; chrome-use uses the one you already have.

The landscape at a glance

Columns are the dimensions that matter most for an AI agent; rows are representative tools. Green = stronger on that axis.

Pick by category

Which to pick

The closest rival: chrome-use vs ego-lite (measured)

ego-lite is positioned closest to us (both "use real logins, don't fight for the user's tabs"), and its README names agent-browser directly. So we ran the same task on both and measured performance and tokens. Fact-checking its "faster, fewer tokens" — one is half-true, the other is exactly backwards.

Tokens (the observation fed to the model — what actually costs money)

Both tools measured back-to-back in the same login state, each on its own defaults (re-run 2026-07): example.com / HN logged out, GitHub logged into the same account on both. Earlier figures (456 / 33.6K, etc.) were stale or captured in a mismatched login state; replaced with independently reproduced values.

Performance (wall-clock)

Raw browser operations are equally fast. ego's edge is its persistent runtime — no per-command process spawn; chrome-use defaults to one-process-per-command (~0.15–0.17s each). So a task with many tiny ops is where ego pulls ahead ("3×" most likely comes from that shape). But a typical task (open + snapshot + extract) measured ~3s on both, and chrome-use's batch (one process reusing the persistent daemon) does 6 ops in 0.19s ≈ ego, plus a WebSocket stream for real-time driving.

Their site's claims vs our evidence

Verbatim from lite.ego.app, each claim fact-checked with evidence. Method is in the workflow below — reproducible.

Where we're ahead: single-pass scripting (chrome-use script)

ego's core pitch is “code base, not CLI base”: write one JS program that runs the whole task in one pass. This one is shipped and ahead: chrome-use script runs a real JS program (ego's exact idiom) driving the page via cu.snapshot/eval/click/fill/find/waitFor/extract, with control flow, returning structured results in one round-trip; a JSON op-list form is also available (dry-runnable, machine-generatable).

The decisive edge is where the engine lives: in the daemon, not the page, so it survives hard navigations — the multi-page flows that are exactly where ego wins and a page-world runtime breaks. Measured: crawl 3 HN pages collecting every ≥100-point story = one tool call (the old per-verb way needs 13+), on your already-logged-in real Chrome over the stealth transport, cross-platform (ego is macOS-only). Full usage and both forms on Single-pass Scripting.

What we learned from ego-lite & ported

After trialing each item, we ported the real gaps the chrome-use way (progress in issue #89):

• Ownership + handoff — implemented session handoff/resume/status/list: once handed off, every browser-driving command on that session is refused. It's an escape hatch for the rare step the agent truly can't do (e.g. an unsolvable captcha) — it does not change autonomous login; by default the agent logs in and drives itself, zero-impact.
• Rich-editor write-probe discipline — ported (see the end of Canvas / WebGL).
• Login inheritance / isolated contexts / reuse-by-name / token economy — already covered (relay carries logins, per-session tab groups, session list, --session-name, leaner tokens).
• Locating — covered · parity: @ref (backendNodeId-stable across calls) + CSS + XPath + coordinates + semantic find role button --name + box geometry + -s scoping, matching ego's loc= / @N.
• Groups — covered · parity: each --session maps to a colored Chrome tab group, group-scoped isolation (#40), agents never cross tabs, a session owns only the tabs it created — equivalent to ego's Task Space, except it happens in your real Chrome instead of a separate browser.

Another close cousin: browser-relay

browser-relay (@linsoai/browser-relay, MIT) is architecturally almost the same idea as us: an extension + local relay driving your real, logged-in Chrome over chrome.debugger / CDP, bound to 127.0.0.1, exposed via CLI + MCP + HTTP, with snapshots annotating interactive elements — no new browser, no throwaway profile. The core idea is at parity. The differences:

Why there's no measured perf / token table here (unlike the ego section above): the two are the same mechanism — extension → relay → CDP driving the same real Chrome, so raw browser operations are necessarily equally fast (both bound by page load + CDP). Performance isn't a differentiator; the only real deltas are CLI startup (our Rust binary vs its Node process) and our batch / script. On tokens, our default snapshot -i is an interactive AX tree (interactive elements only) while theirs is annotated full-page text, so by the ego experience we're likely leaner — but getting exact byte counts would mean installing its chrome.debugger extension into your real Chrome, and a tab can have only one debugger client, so it conflicts head-on with chrome-use. This page's rule is measure or don't claim a number, so this comparison stays qualitative.

The comparison workflow

This page is a living document. For every tool we evaluate, the same loop keeps the comparison honest and reproducible:

1. Trial — the same real task on both; record commands, result, time, tokens.
2. Compare — "already have it," "at parity," or "real gap"; if parity, say so — don't force-port.
3. Port — for a real gap, implement it the chrome-use-native way (keep the zero-install moat), update issue #89 and this page.