head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs skills
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars, 2,615 forks, 227 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. skills has 5,963 stars, 297 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 27 days ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 430% (31,578 vs 5,963 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; skills is written in Python under MIT. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. CloakBrowser was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| CloakBrowser | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick CloakBrowser if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills fits your workflow better
About CloakBrowser
CloakBrowser is a stealth Chromium build for Python and JavaScript teams that need browser automation to survive bot detection systems, aimed at scraping and AI agent engineers who want to replace Playwright or Puppeteer without rewriting their code.
read the full CloakBrowser overview →
About skills
BrowserAct Skills is a browser automation CLI built for AI agents, distributed as an open source Python project under the MIT license. It lives in the agent infrastructure ecosystem, alongside tooling for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agent clients, and it is catalogued here under Data Extraction and Web Scraping. The project has gathered roughly 5,900 stars and 293 forks since it was published about a year ago, with a small open issue count and an active last push.
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or skills more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars and skills has 5,963. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and skills free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and skills?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and skills in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, CloakBrowser or skills?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,578 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.