Cloudflare Built an Agent Browser You Can't Have. This One Has 108,000 Stars.
Two people in Zurich built the thing every AI company is racing to sell you. Here's what it replaces and where the free version stops.
This week Cloudflare launched Kitesurf, a browser built specifically for AI agents. Written in Rust, runs on Workers, uses three to seven times less memory than Chromium. It's genuinely impressive.
You can't have it.
It's a hosted beta on Cloudflare's infrastructure. Their blog says they'll open source it "once we're ready -- hopefully soon." Maybe they will.
Meanwhile there's a repo that already does the job, has done for two years, and sits at 108,300 stars and 11,900 forks. MIT licensed. Two people, Magnus Muller and Gregor Zunic, Zurich and San Francisco.
It's called browser-use, and it's currently beating everybody.
The receipts
browser-use ranks #1 on the Odysseys leaderboard at 87.4% -- ahead of the computer-use agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. Odysseys measures 200 long-horizon web tasks, the kind that take an agent many steps and many pages.
Two people. Beating four of the largest companies on earth at their own benchmark.
And they published the benchmark harness as open source too, which is the part that makes me believe the number.
What it actually does
You describe a task in plain English and it drives a real browser -- opening pages, clicking, typing, filling forms.
The first example in their own README is this: "Fill in this job application with my resume and information."
Which is a strange coincidence, because the other repo I wrote up today is a job search agent. Two of the most-starred projects in open source right now are both, in part, about not having to fill in the same form for the sixtieth time.
Other things people point it at: extracting structured data off a page and dumping it to CSV, and QA-testing a site by describing bugs in English rather than writing selectors.
It plugs into whatever agent you're already using -- Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. One paste-in prompt sets it up.
What it replaces
The hosted-browser layer, which is one of the fastest-growing line items in AI tooling.
Browserbase runs $20 a month for the developer tier and $99 a month for the startup tier, plus $0.10 to $0.12 per browser hour once you're past the allowance, plus token costs on top through their gateway.
Go up the stack to traditional robotic process automation and it gets worse. UiPath starts at $25 a month for the basic self-serve plan, but the component pricing that enterprises actually pay runs roughly $420 per attended robot per year and $1,680 per unattended robot per year.
browser-use, open source, on your own machine: free.
Is it actually trending
108,300 stars and 11,900 forks. MIT. Actively developed.
Put that next to Kitesurf's zero, because Kitesurf doesn't have a repo yet.
The honest catch, and it's a real one
The free version is deliberately the weaker one. This isn't me speculating. Their own README lays out open source versus cloud and says the hosted agent is "much more powerful for complex tasks," recommends it, and puts a benchmark chart next to the claim. The company selling the paid tier is telling you the free tier is the lesser product. I respect them for saying it out loud, and you should plan around it.
You still pay for tokens. Free means free of licensing. Every task burns LLM calls against your own API key.
Reliability is the open question. In the creators' recent AMA, the sharpest question in the thread came from u/GimmeAdviceBitch: "When you say 'plain English automation instead of scripts,' what happens when the agent misreads the page and clicks the wrong thing? Is there a retry?" That's the right question, and it's the one that decides whether this is a toy or a tool.
I'll add my own: community discussion on browser-use is thinner than its star count suggests. Enormous adoption, comparatively quiet crowd. Read that however you like.
Why I'd deploy it
Because the alternative to owning this layer is renting it forever, and the rental market just got a new landlord this week.
Cloudflare's version will probably be excellent. It'll also run on their metal, on their terms, priced whenever they decide beta is over. browser-use runs on mine.
I'm installing this one. When I do, I'll write up the full stack -- what broke, what it cost per task in real tokens, and whether the open-source agent holds up on a job I actually care about. That write-up goes to paid subscribers.
Credits. browser-use is by Magnus Muller and Gregor Zunic. The Kitesurf contrast comes from Cloudflare's own launch post, which is worth reading in full -- they're unusually candid about the tradeoffs.