BrowserAct vs Coasty

BrowserAct and Coasty are both workflow automation tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

BrowserAct

The core loop is prompt-in, structured-data-out: describe what you need, the agent builds and tests a Bot, then publishes it as a reusable scraper you can trigger from Make, n8n, or Zapier. Built-in residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling mean protected pages are reachable without assembling your own infrastructure. The local agent option lets teams run browsers on their own hardware when data cannot leave the building. The ceiling appears when your extraction logic requires conditional branching across multiple page types — the prompt interface has no canvas for that, so complex workflows still need a surrounding orchestration layer. Community ratings on G2 sit at 4.6, suggesting the core promise holds for straightforward collection tasks.

Coasty

Coasty operates real software by sight: it browses portals, clicks, types, and verifies its own output without requiring an API from the target system. The vendor states it ranks first on OSWorld at 85.60% task completion, and the agent is designed to recover autonomously when a UI shifts — which is the specific failure mode that grinds traditional automation to a halt. It fits teams running long, multi-step workflows across carrier portals, ERPs, TMS platforms, or Microsoft 365 consoles. The ceiling appears when you need deep bidirectional data integration rather than screen-level execution; at that point, a native API connector will outperform it on speed and reliability.

Attribute	BrowserAct	Coasty
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	—	$99 flat Unlimited plan; $0.05 per /v1/predict API call
Free trial	7 days	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	Yes	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	No
Platforms	Cloud, Local Agent (browser)	Desktop, Browser, Cloud VMs
Pros	Prompt-only Bot creation, so a team member without CSS or XPath knowledge can ship a working scraper without waiting on engineering — eliminating the selector-maintenance backlog that accumulates every time a monitored site updates its front end. Mid-run adaptation to page changes, which means a scheduled Monday competitor-pricing pull does not silently return zero rows because the target site reorganized its layout over the weekend. Built-in residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling, so reaching protected or geo-restricted pages does not require assembling a separate proxy rotation service before the scraper can be tested. Local agent execution option, so data that cannot leave your network stays on your hardware while still using the same Bot interface — avoiding the compliance conversation that blocks cloud-only scraping tools. Native trigger endpoints for Make, n8n, and Zapier, so scraped data flows directly into existing automation pipelines without a custom API integration step.	Operates any portal by sight without requiring an API from the target system, so workflows that were permanently blocked behind legacy or API-less software become automatable without an IT integration project. Autonomous UI recovery means when a carrier or ERP portal updates its interface, the agent replans from the new screen state rather than throwing an error — so your operations team stops getting paged at 9pm because a scraper broke. Long-horizon task execution across hundreds of steps, so multi-portal workflows like quoting 20 carriers per submission or reconciling month-end statements run without a person stitching together each handoff. Computer-use API with structured JSON output, so development teams can embed screen-reading intelligence into custom agents without building the underlying vision and action model themselves. Human approval and recorded audit trail on sensitive workflows like MSP tenant offboarding, so regulated teams have the sign-off documentation they need without adding a manual review queue on top of the automation.
Cons	Conditional extraction logic — branching based on what a prior page returned, or following different paths depending on live data values — cannot be expressed through the prompt interface. Teams with multi-path scraping workflows end up wrapping Bots in an external automation layer, effectively maintaining two systems. The local agent requires the CLI, which adds a setup and dependency management step that cloud-only teams did not budget for. When something breaks at the OS or browser version level, there is no managed environment to roll back to. Teams whose scraping volume or proxy region requirements exceed the freemium tier hit a paid-only gate. If the cost-per-run at scale exceeds what a self-hosted Playwright or Puppeteer cluster would cost to operate, engineering leads switch to managing their own browser infrastructure and drop BrowserAct entirely.	Screen reading adds execution latency per step that a direct API call does not. Workflows requiring real-time or high-frequency data sync — think live inventory updates or sub-second transactional reconciliation — hit this wall immediately, and teams at that scale switch to native API integrations or ETL pipelines instead. No self-hosted deployment option exists. Teams in environments with strict data residency or air-gapped network requirements cannot keep task execution and screenshot data on their own infrastructure, which is a hard blocker in certain regulated verticals and the primary reason teams move to a self-hostable RPA alternative. Complex multi-agent branching logic that depends on what a prior step returned eventually outgrows what screen-level execution can express cleanly. Teams building workflows beyond four or five conditional branches report adding a custom code orchestration layer — at which point they are maintaining two systems and the simplicity argument for Coasty weakens.

Bottom line

BrowserAct is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between BrowserAct and Coasty?

BrowserAct is Paid and open source, while Coasty is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is BrowserAct better than Coasty?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.