Skyvern
Skyvern is an AI browser automation platform that uses large language models and computer vision to navigate any website without CSS selectors, handling logins, CAPTCHAs, two-factor authentication, form filling and structured data extraction across web portals.
What is Skyvern?
Skyvern is an AI agent platform that automates workflows inside a real browser. Rather than targeting elements through CSS or XPath selectors, it combines large language models with computer vision to read a page the way a person would, interpreting labels and layout and acting on meaning. That design choice is the product's core argument: workflows survive interface changes that would break a conventional Selenium or Playwright script, removing the maintenance burden that traditional automation carries.
The platform is organised around three pillars. The agent builder offers five ways to create a workflow — a Copilot chat that turns plain English into a structured process, uploading an existing standard operating procedure, recording a browser session once, assembling steps in a drag-and-drop visual builder, or writing code. The infrastructure layer supplies persistent browser sessions that preserve cookies and tokens between runs, native CAPTCHA solving, anti-bot bypass for systems such as Cloudflare, DataDome and PerimeterX, residential and datacentre proxy networks with targeting down to city level across more than twenty countries, and an encrypted credential vault whose secrets are never exposed to the model. Generated Playwright code is cached after the first run, which the vendor says makes repeat executions three to five times faster and up to seventy per cent cheaper. The developer tools layer provides Python and TypeScript SDKs that extend Playwright with .act(), .extract() and .validate() methods, a REST API documented by an OpenAPI specification covering more than eighty-seven operations, webhooks, and a hosted Model Context Protocol server.
Skyvern is open source under AGPL-3.0, with more than twenty-two thousand GitHub stars, and runs in three modes: fully managed cloud, self-hosted on the customer's own AWS, GCP or Azure infrastructure, or hybrid. The site documents vertical workflows for healthcare, insurance, fintech and banking, HR, e-commerce, government and logistics, and advertises SOC 2 Type II certification alongside figures of thirty thousand users, five hundred enterprise customers and ten million workflows run. The publisher is Ikonomos Inc., trading as Skyvern; the company went through Y Combinator and Skyvern is its third product.
What it does
- Log into any web portal, including flows protected by two-factor authentication or TOTP codes
- Solve CAPTCHAs natively, covering reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and image-based challenges
- Fill in and submit multi-page forms, applications and compliance filings at scale
- Extract structured data from any site and return it as JSON or CSV
- Download, parse, classify and route documents from vendor and payer portals
- Chain multi-step workflows that span several websites in a single run
- Trigger runs from a REST API, webhooks or no-code platforms such as Zapier and Make
When to use Skyvern / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Skyvern is the right fit.
When to use Skyvern
- Operations teams that log into dozens of supplier, payer or carrier portals every day to pull invoices, documents and statements by hand
- Engineers maintaining brittle Selenium or Playwright suites that break every time a target site changes its interface
- Regulated organisations in healthcare, insurance and financial services that need automation running inside their own AWS, GCP or Azure infrastructure
- Developers who want browser automation as an API, through Python and TypeScript SDKs, a REST endpoint or a Model Context Protocol server
- Business analysts and no-code builders who prefer describing a workflow in plain English or recording it once in a visual builder
When not to use Skyvern
- Anyone seeking professional advice: the terms explicitly rule out legal, financial, medical and immigration guidance, and the tool never decides what to put in a form
- Teams needing a formal HIPAA, GLBA or FISMA guarantee, since section 7.3 of the terms states the Services are not designed to comply with those frameworks
- European organisations requiring a documented GDPR posture, an Article 27 representative or a published data processing agreement, none of which appear anywhere on the site
- HR departments shopping for a dedicated recruiting product, which Skyvern states plainly that it does not offer
- Mobile-first users, as there is no iOS or Android application and no browser extension: the product is a web app and an API
How to use Skyvern
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account on the Skyvern cloud platform: the free tier opens with 5,000 credits and asks for no credit card
- Choose a build path — describe the task to the Copilot chat in plain English, upload a standard operating procedure, record a browser session, or assemble steps in the visual builder
- For a code-first approach, install the SDK with pip install skyvern or npm install @skyvern/client and authenticate with an API key
- Run skyvern quickstart to launch a first automation, which the vendor times at under sixty seconds
- Store the credentials the workflow needs in the encrypted vault, or connect an existing 1Password, Bitwarden or Azure Key Vault instance
- Define the output schema so results come back as JSON or CSV
- Test the run and inspect it step by step using the action summaries, per-step screenshots and immutable logs
- Trigger the finished workflow through the REST API, a webhook, or a no-code connector such as Zapier, Make, n8n or Workato
- Route the extracted data onward to a CRM, ERP or data warehouse
- To keep data in-house, self-host with Docker Compose or pip install and supply your own model provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or Ollama
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Vision-based navigation keeps workflows running when a site redesigns its interface, which is exactly where selector-based scripts fail
- CAPTCHAs and two-factor authentication are handled natively, without subscribing to a separate solving service
- Open source under AGPL-3.0 and fully self-hostable, so regulated teams can keep data inside their own infrastructure
- A genuine permanent free tier of 5,000 credits, with no credit card required
- Two credible entry points: a no-code visual builder for operations staff and Playwright-compatible SDKs for engineers
- Code caching cuts both latency and cost on repeated runs, and makes them deterministic
- Every run is auditable through action summaries, per-step screenshots and immutable logs
Cons
- The terms of service state the platform is not designed to comply with HIPAA, GLBA or FISMA, which directly contradicts the HIPAA badge shown on the homepage and the HIPAA promise in the Enterprise plan
- The GDPR is never mentioned, no EU representative is designated and no data processing agreement is published, leaving European buyers without documented ground
- No postal address appears anywhere on the site, and support runs through a single shared mailbox and booking links
- Data hosting is described only as running on AWS, with no region or country ever stated
- Several essentials — HIPAA coverage, the SOC 2 report, Azure Key Vault, Bitwarden, human-in-the-loop review — sit behind an Enterprise plan whose price is not public
- Hobby and Pro credits reset each billing cycle and do not roll over
- Customers alone carry the risk of automating third-party sites, including whether CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot bypass breach those sites' own terms
Pricing & Plans
Skyvern offers a permanent free plan providing 5,000 credits with no credit card required. The lowest paid entry point is the Hobby plan at 29.00 USD per month, which includes 30,000 credits per month. The Pro plan is priced at 149.00 USD per month for 150,000 credits, and the Enterprise plan is quoted on request. All published amounts are monthly prices; the site advertises no discounted annual commitment. Credits are consumed according to the complexity and duration of each run, and billing is per workflow execution rather than per page or per step.
- 5
- 000 credits
- 1 concurrent run
- webhooks
- country-level geo-targeting
- basic CAPTCHA solver
- datacentre proxy
- community support
- 30
- 000 credits per month
- 10 concurrent runs
- basic CAPTCHA solver
- stored credentials
- webhooks
- country-level geo-targeting
- email support
- 150
- 000 credits per month
- 25 concurrent runs
- advanced CAPTCHA solver
- team workspaces
- 2FA and TOTP support
- 1Password integration
- residential proxy
- custom credits
- 100 concurrent runs
- HIPAA compliance with BAA
- SOC-2 report
- dedicated Slack channel
- Azure Key Vault and Bitwarden integrations
- custom code blocks
- human-in-the-loop
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Skyvern handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site. Across every page collected — privacy policy, terms of service, product and pricing pages — the regulation is never named, no Article 27 representative in the European Union is designated, and no data protection officer is appointed. The privacy policy builds its entire rights framework on United States state law instead, citing California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. Residents of those states may confirm processing, access, delete, correct, port their data and opt out of targeted advertising, by emailing support@skyvern.com. The agreement is governed by Delaware law with arbitration in Wilmington. This silence is not a refusal of compliance: the subject is simply never addressed, so European buyers have nothing documented to rely on.
Who owns the data?
Customers keep ownership of everything they submit. Section 8.3 of the terms defines it as Your Content and grants Skyvern only a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, process and transmit it for the purpose of providing and improving the Services. The platform itself works the other way: software, algorithms, AI models, interfaces and documentation belong to the vendor, and the Skyvern name and logo are trademarks of Ikonomos Inc. One clause deserves attention: any feedback or suggestion a customer sends becomes subject to a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence, with no compensation and no attribution.
Reuse rights
Because customers retain ownership of their content, they may reuse whatever their automations produce without asking Skyvern for permission. The constraint sits elsewhere, on the vendor's side and on the target sites. Skyvern processes submitted data to run the requested tasks, which may include government identifiers, third-party login credentials, financial details and health information. Screenshots and session recordings are generated and stored, and screenshots are sent to third-party model providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock. Anonymised or aggregated data may feed model training, though customers can opt out by writing to support@skyvern.com or through an enterprise agreement. Skyvern states it does not sell personal information. Customers remain solely responsible for holding the rights to the data they submit and for complying with the terms of every site they automate.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Skyvern discloses very little about where data physically lives. The privacy policy states that AWS is used for cloud infrastructure and data storage, but names no region, no data centre and no country, and the site publishes no list of hosting locations. Data in transit is described as encrypted with TLS 1.3 and data at rest with AES-256, and page content is said not to be stored by default, with storage available as an opt-in for debugging. Automation screenshots are transmitted to third-party model providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock — whose own locations are not specified either. Customers who need control over data residency are pointed towards the self-hosted deployment, where the workload runs on their own AWS, GCP or Azure account, or towards the hybrid mode combining cloud orchestration with self-hosted browser execution. The vendor's trust centre, which might have clarified this, is rendered entirely in JavaScript and its contents could not be retrieved.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Skyvern.
- The terms of service declare the Services are not designed to comply with HIPAA, GLBA or FISMA, while the homepage and Enterprise plan advertise HIPAA compliance: resolve this in writing before any regulated use
- Automating a third-party site is entirely at your own risk — you warrant you are authorised to do so, and you indemnify Skyvern for any breach of that site's terms, which automated CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot bypass may well constitute
- You hand over login credentials for third-party accounts, and screenshots that may display government identifiers, financial details or health data are transmitted to external model providers
- Liability is capped at the greater of the fees paid in the previous twelve months or 100 USD, disputes go to binding arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware, and class actions are waived
- Delegating portal work to an agent erodes the team's first-hand knowledge of those processes; when a workflow silently fails, no one may remember how the task was done manually
- Automated output is not verified by anyone: the vendor guarantees neither accuracy nor acceptance of a submitted form, so a plausible but wrong entry can be filed without a human ever reading it
- The vendor may suspend or terminate an account at any time without notice and with no refund, and may change the terms with immediate effect on posting
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Difficulty depends entirely on the path chosen. The no-code route is genuinely accessible: open a free account, describe the task to the copilot in plain English or record a browser session, and refine it in a drag-and-drop builder — no code at all. The developer route is straightforward for anyone who has met Playwright, since the SDKs simply add AI commands to the familiar page object; the vendor claims a first automation in under sixty seconds. Self-hosting is markedly harder, requiring Docker Compose or a server install, database migrations and your own model provider credentials.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Skyvern
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Skyvern.
Frequently asked questions
What does Skyvern actually do?
How is it different from Selenium, Playwright or traditional RPA?
Is there an API, and can I use it from code?
Can I self-host it?
Is there a free plan, and what does a credit represent?
Does Skyvern handle CAPTCHAs and two-factor authentication?
Will my data be used to train models?
Is Skyvern compliant with HIPAA, SOC 2 and the GDPR?
What is the minimum age to use the service?
Should you pick Skyvern?
Skyvern makes a coherent technical argument and backs it with unusually complete tooling. By reading pages visually instead of binding to selectors, it targets the single biggest cost of traditional browser automation — the maintenance triggered every time a site changes — and it goes further than most competitors by solving CAPTCHAs and two-factor authentication natively rather than outsourcing them. The dual entry point is genuine: operations teams get a visual builder and a natural-language copilot, while engineers get Playwright-compatible SDKs, a documented REST API and an MCP server. Being open source under AGPL-3.0 and fully self-hostable is a real answer to data-sovereignty requirements, and the free tier is a permanent plan rather than a countdown.
Two reservations should temper that. The first is a direct contradiction: the homepage displays a HIPAA badge and the Enterprise plan promises HIPAA coverage with a BAA, yet section 7.3 of the terms of service states the Services are not designed or intended to comply with HIPAA, GLBA or FISMA. Both statements cannot be true, and any organisation handling regulated data should settle the point in writing before signing. The second is documentary thinness around governance: the GDPR is never mentioned, no EU representative is designated, no data processing agreement is published, no hosting region is disclosed, and no postal address appears anywhere on the site. Add the structural exposure of the model — third-party login credentials held by the vendor, and screenshots that may carry sensitive data sent to external model providers — and the diligence burden is real.
For an engineering or operations team automating portals that expose no API, Skyvern is a credible and mature option. For a European or regulated buyer, it is worth a close look at the contract first.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.