Cua: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Cua does

Cua belongs to the computer use family: agents that see the screen and drive the keyboard and mouse of a computer or phone. On our grid it ranks #2 of the 17 projects of this family listed in the directory.

It is not an agent in itself: it is a component other agents use (memory, isolated execution, web access, model gateway or monitoring). You pick it based on the agent or framework it has to equip.

You use it from: developer SDK and API. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Cua for?

It is for people who want to automate desktop software with no API, by driving the screen as a person would. Typical tasks people give it:

• chain actions in legacy business software
• copy data from one application to another
• test a desktop application

It is a good candidate if your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Cua can:

• control the screen, keyboard and mouse

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Cua pricing

The code is free, under the MIT licence.

Getting started with Cua

1. Install it: the project ships as a compiled Rust binary (direct download or cargo install). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Start with the minimal example from the docs, then add one tool at a time and check what the agent does with it.
3. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

An agent that controls the computer has the same rights as you: run it in a dedicated virtual machine.

Points found for Cua:

• Sensitive access: it can control the screen, keyboard and mouse, with no established default human approval.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on January 31, 2025, the trycua/cua repository has 30,856 stars, 2,250 forks and 667 open issues, with 5,863 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 3,886 commits, an average of 74.7 per week.

801 releases in total; 21 in the last twelve months. Latest release: cua-spacesd-v0.8.0, on October 24, 2026.

Cua vs other computer use

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the computer use family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Cua and other computer use at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 80/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 30/40: 30,856 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 21 releases in six months, 3,886 commits in a year.
• Framework 20/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.