UI-TARS Desktop
ByteDance's open GUI agent stack for driving computers and browsers with vision-language models.
About
Two complementary projects share the UI-TARS-desktop repository: UI-TARS Desktop, a native application that turns natural language into GUI actions on your local computer and browser, and Agent TARS, a general multimodal agent framework with CLI and web interfaces plus MCP tool integration. Both are powered by vision-language models that ground their actions in what is on screen, either the open UI-TARS 1.5 and 1.6 models ByteDance publishes on Hugging Face for local deployment or hosted options such as the Doubao vision series on VolcEngine and Claude. Browser control works through DOM inspection or pure visual grounding, and the stack supports local and remote computer operators, streaming tool output, and runtime statistics. Getting started takes Node.js 22 and npx @agent-tars/cli@latest, or a packaged desktop build. The code is Apache-2.0 licensed with about 38,000 GitHub stars, and the v0.3.0 release landed in November 2025, keeping this among the leading open computer-use agent stacks alongside the models that share its name.
Should you use UI-TARS Desktop?
Pick it when
Choose UI-TARS Desktop when an agent must operate native desktop apps as well as browsers by looking at the screen, and you want the option of running ByteDance's open UI-TARS models locally instead of a hosted API.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if your tasks are web-only, where browser-use or Stagehand are lighter libraries to embed. Running the open models locally means serving a vision-language model yourself; hosted options include Doubao on VolcEngine and Claude.
Alternatives to UI-TARS Desktop
- Browser Use
Python library for browser-only agents built on Playwright; simpler to embed in code, but cannot drive native desktop apps.
- Agent Zero
Ships a full Linux desktop inside Docker that the agent drives, keeping its actions sandboxed instead of on your own machine.
- Skyvern
Vision-based browser automation with a no-code builder and 2FA logins; stronger for repeatable web workflows, but AGPL-3.0 licensed.
- Open Interpreter
Terminal agent that acts through code and shell commands rather than screen clicks; a better fit when the task does not need a GUI.
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Details
- Category
- AI Agents & Orchestration
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026