Comet is Perplexity's Chromium-based browser with an agentic assistant built into the sidebar, and it's the most accessible tool on this list by a wide margin: it launched in July 2025 gated behind a $200/month Max subscription, and Perplexity dropped that paywall entirely on March 18, 2026, rolling the full agentic experience out free on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. The assistant reads the current page, summarizes it, cross-references open tabs, and executes multi-step tasks — compare pricing across three project management tools, and Comet will open the tabs, read each page, and return a structured comparison. Deep Research, voice mode, and a shopping assistant all ship in the free tier. Paid tiers exist mainly for volume and priority: Pro at $20/month raises usage limits, and Max at $200/month adds Perplexity Computer, a separate orchestration layer that runs up to 20 models and 400+ app connectors for heavier background automation. One B2B software architect's blunt review from Comet's paywalled era still holds up as a fair caution about the top tier specifically: "At $200/month, it's an expensive bet on future features rather than current value." That criticism doesn't apply to the now-free core experience, which is genuinely the best entry point into agentic browsing available today.

Best for: Anyone who wants agentic browsing today at no cost. Pricing: Free core; Pro $20/mo; Max $200/mo.

Atlas is OpenAI's Chromium-based browser, launched in October 2025, with ChatGPT built into the sidebar and an optional Agent Mode that takes a single instruction and executes it end to end — researching a topic, building a grocery list, filling a checkout form — while visibly showing each action it takes. Its standout feature is Browser Memories, which reuses ChatGPT's existing memory so the agent carries your stated preferences between sessions instead of starting cold every time, and OpenAI has continued improving task persistence through 2026, with agent runs now resuming more reliably after a pause than in earlier versions.

The two limitations are real and worth stating plainly. Atlas remains macOS-only as of mid-2026, with no confirmed Windows release date, so it simply isn't an option for the majority of desktop users. And on security, independent enterprise testing found Atlas blocked only 5.8 to 6 percent of malicious pages specifically designed to hijack its agent through prompt injection — a number that reflects how unsolved this entire category's security problem still is, not that Atlas is uniquely careless; OpenAI shipped a patch in December 2025 after its own red-teaming found a new injection class, and runs continuous adversarial testing against it. Agent Mode itself sits behind a paid ChatGPT plan (Plus at $20/month or higher), so the browser shell is free but the headline feature isn't.

Best for: macOS users already paying for ChatGPT who want the deepest single-instruction agent on this list. Pricing: Free browsing; Agent Mode requires Plus ($20/mo)+.

Browser Use is an open-source Python library — not a browser you install, but infrastructure you build on — that lets any LLM drive a real Playwright-controlled browser session: navigating, clicking, filling forms, and extracting data from sites that have no API, including ones the model has never seen before. It's become the closest thing to a standard in this category, with more than 100,000 GitHub stars and a state-of-the-art 89.1% score on the WebVoyager benchmark (586 diverse real-world web tasks), the highest of any tool in this comparison with a published, third-party-referenced score.

The free tier is genuinely usable for evaluation — 10 agent tasks a month with 3 concurrent sessions, no card required. The Dev tier at $29/month includes $29 in matching credits, 25 concurrent sessions, and stealth browsers for sites that actively block automated traffic; usage past that runs on published rates ($0.06 per browser-session hour, $5 per GB of proxy bandwidth). It has no no-code interface, so it's squarely a developer tool: you're writing code to define what the agent does, not clicking through a dashboard.

Best for: Developers building their own product on top of a browser agent rather than using one as an end-user tool. Pricing: Free (10 tasks/mo); Dev $29/mo; Business $299/mo.

Genspark is best understood as an all-in-one AI workspace rather than a browser agent specifically — its Super Agent orchestrates nine underlying LLMs and more than 80 tools, one of which is an agentic AI Browser that can navigate and act on live pages as part of a larger task. A single prompt like "research the EV market and build me a 10-slide investor deck" chains research, an agentic browsing pass, a cited Sparkpage, and a generated slide deck without switching apps. That breadth is the actual pitch: it's closer to a Perplexity-plus-Gamma-plus-agent bundle than a dedicated browsing tool.

Pricing runs on a credit system that's drawn some real user complaints about clarity. The free plan includes 100 credits a day, enough to sample most tools. Plus is $24.99/month (10,000 monthly credits), and Pro is $249.99/month (125,000 credits) — everyday chat and image generation are unlimited and credit-free on paid plans through the end of 2026, but heavier actions like video generation, long Super Agent runs, and slide/sheet generation draw from the metered pool, and it takes some hands-on use to learn which actions actually cost what.

Best for: Solo creators and consultants who want research, slides, sheets, and browsing bundled into one subscription instead of four separate tools. Pricing: Free (100 credits/day); Plus $24.99/mo; Pro $249.99/mo.

Dia is The Browser Company's successor to Arc, rebuilt around AI rather than the tab-management ideas Arc was known for. It emphasizes context-aware productivity — an assistant that understands your open tabs and recent browsing history to help draft, summarize, and act across the sites you actually use for work, positioned more toward knowledge workers living inside SaaS tools than toward general-purpose research. In a notable sign of how this category is consolidating, The Browser Company sold itself to Atlassian for $610 million in 2026, with Dia being steered toward deeper integration with Atlassian's own product suite going forward.

Like Atlas, Dia remains macOS-only as of mid-2026 and is still officially in beta, with a Windows build in development but unshipped. Pro access runs roughly $20/month for the deeper AI features, in line with most of the paid tier pricing across this category.

Best for: Knowledge workers on macOS who want an AI browser tuned for SaaS-heavy daily workflows, and who are comfortable adopting a beta product mid-acquisition. Pricing: Free core; Pro ~$20/mo.

OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin) is an open-source autonomous software engineering platform, not a browser agent first — but web browsing is one of its native tools, alongside a terminal, code editor, and file system, all running inside a sandboxed Docker environment. Given a GitHub issue, it plans and executes a full solution: writing code, running test suites, browsing the web for documentation when it needs to, and opening a pull request, iterating until the task is done or it gets stuck. It's model-agnostic, working with Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, or local models, and reported GitHub star counts vary by source but consistently sit in the tens of thousands, reflecting real, sustained community adoption rather than a launch-week spike.

Three deployment paths exist: fully self-hosted and free under MIT license, a free-tier cloud SaaS on a bring-your-own-key basis (capped at 10 daily conversations on the free Individual tier), and custom Enterprise pricing with VPC deployment, SSO, and named support. The realistic monthly cost for active use is $0 with local models or roughly $6–$200+ with cloud LLM APIs, entirely dependent on usage volume and model choice.

Best for: Development teams that want a self-hostable, full software-engineering agent where browsing is a supporting tool, not the main product. Pricing: Free (MIT, self-hosted); free cloud tier (BYOK); custom Enterprise.

Goose is Block's (the company behind Square, Cash App, and Tidal) open-source coding agent, built in Rust under the Apache 2.0 license and now governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation after moving out from under Block's direct internal ownership in 2026. Browsing isn't a core built-in feature the way it is for OpenHands — instead, Goose reaches the web through community-built MCP extensions, of which there are dozens covering browsers, databases, and dev tools, on top of Block's own official set for GitHub, Slack, and similar services. That makes Goose's web capability real but assembled, not native out of the box, which is worth knowing before assuming it browses like a dedicated agent would.

It's genuinely free with no paid tier at all — you bring your own LLM key (Claude, GPT, Gemini, or a local Ollama model for zero incremental cost) and pay only for what that provider charges. Block runs Goose internally across its own 13,000-plus-person engineering org, which is a meaningful vote of confidence from the company funding its development. It assumes real comfort with terminals and configuration files; this is not a tool for someone who wants a point-and-click experience.

Best for: Developers who want an Apache-2.0, MCP-native agent with full commercial-use freedom and no vendor lock-in on the model. Pricing: Free (Apache 2.0); you pay only for LLM API usage.