head to head · open source
stagehand vs skills
stagehand has 24,565 GitHub stars, 1,698 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped today. skills has 5,963 stars, 297 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 27 days ago. stagehand leads on adoption by 312% (24,565 vs 5,963 stars). stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT; skills is written in Python under MIT. stagehand has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. stagehand was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, data-extraction), 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
| stagehand | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick stagehand if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 stagehand
Stagehand is the MIT licensed SDK for extracting data and interacting with any site on the web, available in TypeScript, Python, and Go, and aimed at developers building AI agents that need to drive a browser the way a person does rather than at engineers writing test suites.
read the full stagehand 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 stagehand or skills more popular?
stagehand has 24,565 GitHub stars and skills has 5,963. stagehand has the larger community by that measure.
Are stagehand and skills free?
Both are open source. stagehand is licensed under MIT and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between stagehand and skills?
stagehand is written in TypeScript 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, stagehand or skills?
Choose stagehand if you want the larger community (24,565 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.