Skyvern's main technical bet is replacing brittle, hand-written CSS selectors with computer vision and an LLM's visual understanding of a page, which means it can navigate a website it has never encountered before, something traditional scraping and automation scripts generally can't do without being built and maintained specifically for that one site.
It's aimed squarely at workflow automation: filling out forms, navigating multi-step processes like applying for something or submitting a claim, and handling sites that change their layout often enough to break hand-written automation scripts regularly. That focus on messy, real-world form-filling workflows sets it apart from more research-oriented browser agents focused on open-ended benchmark tasks.
It's open source with a managed cloud option for teams that don't want to run the infrastructure themselves, competing with Browser Use on the open-source side and with Browserbase's infrastructure layer on the hosted side, though Skyvern's vision-based approach to element identification is a meaningfully different technical bet than selector or DOM-based automation.