BrowserBash vs cua

BrowserBash and cua 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.

BrowserBash

BrowserBash is a CLI that takes a plain-English objective and drives a real Chrome browser to completion, returning NDJSON events on stdout and a process exit code your CI pipeline can act on without parsing prose. The default stack runs entirely on local models via Ollama — no API keys, no cloud, no account required to run. A free dashboard account adds run history, video recordings, and per-run replay. The architecture is three swappable layers — browser provider, interpretation engine, and LLM — so a team using local Chromium today can route to BrowserStack tomorrow with one flag. Where the tool strains is complex multi-step conditional logic: an objective that branches on what a previous step returned still lands on a single-loop AI agent with no visual workflow editor to inspect.

cua

Cua provisions cross-OS fleets from a single API, forks machine state over copy-on-write snapshots so you can reproduce failures without rebuilding from scratch, and serves pre-booted machines from warm pools that claim in milliseconds. The open-source Cua Driver runs background desktop automation on macOS and Windows — agents click, type, scroll, and inspect accessibility trees without stealing your cursor. Linux support in Cua Driver is in pre-release, so teams with Linux-heavy desktop workflows will hit that wall immediately. At scale, you either point your training loop at live warm pools or order verified trajectory datasets that arrive pre-packaged for your ingestion pipeline.

Attribute	BrowserBash	cua
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	CLI (npm), local Chrome, any CDP endpoint	macOS, Windows, Linux (pre-release), Android
Pros	Runs on free local models via Ollama with no API keys and no account required, so a developer on a locked-down corporate network can automate and test without touching a billing page. Exit codes 0/1/2/3 on stdout as NDJSON, which means CI pipelines get a machine-readable verdict without a fragile scraping layer on top of prose output. Markdown test files with @import composition are committable artifacts, so tests live in version control alongside code and can be reviewed, diffed, and rolled back like any other file. Three independently swappable layers — provider, engine, LLM — so a team running local Chromium for development can point the same objective at BrowserStack for grid runs with a single flag change, without rewriting the test. Secrets marked in the config are masked as asterisks in every log line and summary, which means test runs against staging environments with real credentials do not leak those credentials into CI logs.	One API boots Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android machines across six local runtimes or the cloud, so you stop maintaining separate provisioning scripts for each OS your agents target. Copy-on-write snapshot forking lets you branch from a known machine state for every parallel episode, which means failures reproduce against the exact environment that produced them — no manual state reconstruction. Warm pools serve pre-booted machines in milliseconds, so large parallel eval batches do not serialize on cold-start latency the way they do with on-demand VM provisioning. Cua Driver runs background desktop automation without capturing focus or the cursor, so an agent can operate continuously on a developer's machine without interrupting their session — the thing that makes persistent eval loops on shared hardware viable. MIT-licensed open-source control and eval layers mean you can audit, fork, and self-host the Driver and Bench components, so vendor lock-in on the core automation interface is not a forcing function.
Cons	The agent loop has no conditional branching construct: if your automation needs to take different actions depending on what appeared on a previous page, you are encoding that logic in shell scripts around the exit codes — at which point you are maintaining test orchestration infrastructure outside the tool. There is no API surface, so embedding BrowserBash into an application that needs to trigger browser tasks programmatically at runtime is not supported; the CLI is the only integration point, and teams needing in-process browser automation switch to Playwright or Puppeteer with their own LLM layer. The dashboard and run retention are cloud-hosted and account-gated; teams with strict data residency requirements who also want video replay and run history cannot self-host the full stack — the CLI is self-hostable but the vendor states the dashboard is not described as self-hostable on the page.	Cua Driver's Linux desktop backend is in pre-release. Teams whose agents target Linux native apps cannot ship production automation against it — they run macOS or Windows coverage and maintain a separate path for Linux, or they wait on a release timeline the docs do not commit to. Verified trajectory datasets are produced and scored by Cua's own evaluators running on Cua's environments. Teams with strict data-provenance requirements or proprietary app surfaces that cannot be handed to a third-party fleet will need to run their own rollouts, which folds the full harness-management burden back onto them. The benchmark data the vendor surfaces — the best frontier agent clearing 6 of 25 expert KiCad tasks — scopes to a narrow expert domain. Teams trying to predict how their agent will perform on general enterprise UI workflows have precious little external validation data to anchor against, and will need to author their own Cua Bench evals before the infrastructure investment pays off.

Bottom line

Cua is open source; only cua exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between BrowserBash and cua?

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

Is BrowserBash better than cua?

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.