Midscene: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Midscene does

Midscene 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 #1 of the 17 projects of this family listed in the directory.

Unlike a ready-made agent, a framework provides the parts to build one: tool calling, step sequencing, memory, coordination of several agents. It is aimed at teams that want a custom agent.

You use it from: developer SDK and terminal (CLI). Usable models: GPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), and Qwen (Alibaba). It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Midscene 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 you are comfortable in a terminal and your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

A framework has no access of its own: the tools you plug in define what the agent can do. Start with read-only tools.

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

Midscene pricing

The code is free, under the MIT licence.

Getting started with Midscene

1. Install it: the project ships as a Node.js package (install with npm, or run directly with npx). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Start with the minimal example from the docs, then add one tool at a time and check what the agent does with it.
4. 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.

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 July 23, 2024, the web-infra-dev/midscene repository has 15,380 stars, 1,201 forks and 44 open issues, with 2,408 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 1,354 commits, an average of 26 per week.

221 releases in total; 30 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v1.17.0, on October 23, 2026.

Midscene 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.

Midscene 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: 81/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 26/40: 15,380 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 30 releases in six months, 1,354 commits in a year.
• Framework 25/30: 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.