Nope, Stagehand is open-source and works with local browsers by default.

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A lot, especially for performance. That's why we built our own benchmarks that account for both the model and the harness. For example, with Claude Opus 5, the accuracy gap can be up to 3% and performance up to 200ms, depending on whether you're using Deep Agents, Eve, or Fx.

More details here: https://www.stagehand.dev/evals

I tried this myself - my conclusion was the overhead of parsing a screenshot, generating an action, and being limited to headful mode is much less efficient than reading accessibility trees & generating CDP commands.

basically, browser automation is a closer-to-the-metal abstraction than computer use, allows more flexibility, and ends up being much cheaper at scale!

Astra with computer use seems to burn a ton of tokens though. Stagehand seems more token efficient.

If agents need to run on the desktop or logged into a user's real browser, the alternative would be Ui.Vision MCP. But stagehand is designed for backend use, so apples and oranges.

Money?

A lot of folks use Playwright for UI testing.