chrome-use vs cua

Bottom line

chrome-use is free, while cua has a free plan plus paid upgrades.

Which one should you try?

chrome-use

Free

Best for Developers building agentic browser tools

Visit chrome-use See full review

cua

Freemium

Best for AI agent developers needing cross-OS desktop control

Visit cua See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

chrome-use

Because chrome-use attaches to the Chrome instance you already use day-to-day, the agent inherits your cookies, your fingerprint, and your authenticated state — no credential injection, no headless flags that anti-bot systems fingerprint in milliseconds. The extension-relay architecture means the browser looks identical to your normal traffic. Where it breaks: tasks that need a clean isolated session per run, or parallel agents that must operate on separate authenticated identities simultaneously, get complicated fast because you are sharing one browser. Teams hitting that ceiling wire in additional Chrome profiles or move the workflow to a cloud browser infrastructure that supports session isolation at scale.

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	chrome-use	cua
Pricing	Free	Freemium
Pricing checked	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Free trial	Not stated	Not stated
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Chrome (via extension), cross-platform CLI	macOS, Windows, Linux (pre-release), Android
Pros	Drives your actual installed Chrome with real session cookies already present, so agents can act inside accounts on sites that would immediately block a fresh headless session. Anti-bot detection passes by default because the browser fingerprint, TLS signature, and extension profile are all genuine — teams do not need to maintain rotating proxies or fingerprint spoofing layers to get past these checks. CAPTCHA and 2FA prompts pause the agent loop and let you intervene directly in your open browser, then hand control back — so workflows don't hard-fail on authentication challenges the way headless runners do. Apache-2.0 license with a self-hosted CLI means no vendor lock-in, no usage metering, and no data leaving your machine during automation runs. Multi-agent workflows can share one authenticated browser instance without re-authenticating per agent, which removes the credential management complexity that burns time in multi-step pipelines.	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	Parallel automation against multiple accounts hits a hard wall: because the tool shares your single Chrome instance and its session state, running two agents on two different logins at the same time requires maintaining separate Chrome profiles and coordinating which profile each agent targets — at which point session management becomes a manual orchestration problem your team now owns. Unattended server-side automation is not a supported model — the tool requires a running Chrome instance on the host machine, which means it does not fit into a headless CI/CD pipeline or a cloud worker that spins up on demand. Teams that need fully unattended, server-side browser automation switch to Playwright-based runners or cloud browser providers like Browserbase or Steel. There is no API surface — agents integrate exclusively through the CLI or extension relay, so dropping chrome-use into an existing platform that expects a REST or WebSocket browser control interface requires building a wrapper layer your team then maintains across version updates.	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.

Made up your mind?

chrome-use

Free

Best for Developers building agentic browser tools

Visit chrome-use See full review

cua

Freemium

Best for AI agent developers needing cross-OS desktop control

Visit cua See full review

Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

chrome-use vs cua

Which one should you try?

chrome-use

cua

chrome-use

cua

Made up your mind?

chrome-use

cua

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