Stagehand

Open-source AI browser-automation framework from Browserbase. Built on Playwright; v2 (June 2025) added self-healing retry logic and full MCP-native integration so it works as a sub-agent inside Cline and Cursor without leaving the IDE. Three primary verbs — navigate, act, extract, observe — make natural-language browser tasks ergonomic.

  • Vendor: Browserbase
  • Repo: github.com/browserbase/stagehand
  • Built on: Playwright
  • Backend: Browserbase serverless browser runtime (free sandbox available; ~10¢/hour for paid)

What’s new in v2

  • Self-healing: when the DOM changes, Stagehand retries with alternative selector strategies instead of breaking
  • MCP-native: drop-in install via Cline’s MCP marketplace; Cursor works the same way
  • Standalone Python lib still supported

Model recommendations (from Stagehand’s own benchmarks)

SlotModelWhy
Fastest + cheapestDeepSeek R1 distilled Qwen 32Bbest speed/cost on Stagehand’s eval
Most accurateGemini 2.0 Flashbest multimodal grounding

Why it matters

Stagehand fills the browser-automation slot in the wiki’s open-source agent landscape. Compared to browser-use (Python-only, no MCP story), Stagehand is the polished MCP-native option. Sibling to the Computer Agent inside CodeLLM (this batch) — same use case, but Stagehand is OSS and host-agnostic.

Sources

See Also

  • Cline / Cursor — primary MCP hosts
  • MCP
  • DeepSeek R1 distilled — recommended cheap model
  • CodeLLM — sibling browser-control agent (closed-source)