Roubao: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Roubao does

Roubao 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 #16 of the 17 projects of this family listed in the directory.

You use it from: mobile app. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Roubao 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, Roubao 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.

Roubao pricing

The code is free, under the MIT licence.

Getting started with Roubao

1. Install it by following the repository README (project written in Kotlin).
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
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.

Points found for Roubao:

• 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 December 9, 2025, the Turbo1123/roubao repository has 2,404 stars, 254 forks and 38 open issues, with 33 commits in total. Last change 10 months ago.

Over the last 52 weeks: 26 commits, an average of 0.5 per week.

8 releases in total; 8 in the last twelve months. Latest release: V1.4.2, on December 18, 2025.

Roubao 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.

Roubao 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: 37/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 17/40: 2,404 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 5/30: last commit 10 months ago, 0 releases in six months, 26 commits in a year.
• Framework 15/30: 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.