What This Actually Is
A browser that does the browsing for you
Polar is a real Chromium browser (same engine as Chrome), built by a team that came out of Perplexity's Comet browser. The difference is what it's built to do: instead of you clicking through 30 tabs to research a competitor or fill out the same form 40 times, you type what you want done and Polar does it, logged into your actual accounts, using tools you already have open.
It's not limited to quick lookups either. People have had it run for over 15 hours straight on a single task, and the company says users have handed it 4.5 million actions total, mostly research, sales outreach, recruiting, and ops busywork.
The headline that got everyone's attention: on the Odysseys BU Bench V1 web-agent benchmark, Polar scored 98.0. Claude Opus 4.6 scored 44.5. GPT-5.4 scored 60.8. Those are Polar's own published numbers, worth a grain of salt since they ran the test on themselves, but it's still the best score anyone's posted publicly. The company (Recursive Intelligence) just raised $5.7M led by Madrona to keep building it.
One thing Polar won't tell you: which AI model actually powers it under the hood. Doesn't change how to use it, just worth knowing going in.
Before You Start
What you need
A Mac
Polar is macOS-only right now. No Windows or Linux build yet, so if you're not on a Mac, this one has to wait.
An account you're willing to sign in with
Everything runs through the cloud, so you have to be signed in before you can do anything at all, even browse a normal webpage.
One real task in mind
Don't overthink this. "Find me the highest-rated version of X on Amazon" or "research these 5 companies and summarize what they do" is plenty for your first run.
Step 1
Download and install
Go to polarbrowser.com/download and grab the macOS build. It installs like any other Mac app, drag it into Applications and open it.
You do not have to make Polar your default browser to get value from it. It works fine as a second browser you open specifically to hand off tasks, though the team says it works best as your daily driver since it builds up context on your work over time.
Step 2
Sign in and watch the onboarding
First launch asks you to sign in immediately, before you can do anything else. That's normal, not a bug. Since every task runs through Polar's cloud, your usage has to be tied to an account from the very first click.
Right after that, a short onboarding video plays that walks through the interface. Watch it, it's quick and it saves you from hunting for buttons later.
You'll land with 3,000 free credits already loaded on your account. That's real usable runway, more on how far it stretches below.
Step 3
Give it your first task
The left sidebar has New Task, Templates, Workflows, Connectors, and Customize. A new tab in Polar doubles as the chat interface, so you can just start typing what you want done right there. The regular address bar is still up top for normal browsing whenever you need it.
Type the task in plain English, the same way you'd tell a person. No special syntax, no prompt engineering. Something like:
Example first task
Go to Amazon and add the highest-rated ballpoint pen to my cart. Explain why you picked it.
Hit send and watch the browser tab drive itself, it's genuinely worth watching the first time. You'll see it click, scroll, and read the page the same way you would. It'll also flag anything it needs from you, like telling you if you weren't signed into an account it needed.
Step 4
Browse the template library instead of starting blank
If you're not sure what to hand it, don't stare at a blank box. Click Templates in the sidebar or go to polarbrowser.com/templates. There are 250+ ready-made prompts organized by category, and every single one shows you the exact prompt behind it before you run it.
Sales & Recruiting
Build a prospect list from LinkedIn, source 30 candidates for a role, draft replies to threads waiting on you.
Research & Data
Deep-dive every company in a category into a market map, scrape a directory into a clean spreadsheet.
Ops & Marketing
Triage your inbox every morning, find 50 creators in your niche with verified emails, run a collections sweep.
Personal
Watch a booked-out restaurant for a table, plan a trip with live hotel prices, find an apartment under budget.
Step 5
Turn a good task into a scheduled workflow
Once a task works the way you want it, save it instead of retyping it. Any task can become a Workflow that runs on its own schedule, hourly, daily, weekly, or a custom cadence you set, and it carries the same context into every run.
This is the actual unlock. A daily 7am briefing pulled from your Slack, calendar, and inbox. A morning sweep that drafts replies to whatever's waiting on you. A weekly check on what competitors changed on their pricing page. Set it once, stop thinking about it.
Don't Burn Through Your Free Tier By Accident
How credits and execution modes actually work
Every task costs credits, and the cost swings a lot depending on how long and complex it is. A simple task, like adding one item to an Amazon cart, ran about 58 credits in early testing. A long writing task with a lot of back-and-forth ran over 200. That matters because of how the free tier is structured.
3,000 credits on signup
Your real starting runway. Spend it on tasks that actually matter, not on testing random one-liners.
100 credits per day after that
Once the signup credits are gone, you're back to a daily allowance that resets at midnight. That's roughly one to two real tasks a day, not unlimited use.
Paid plans start at $20/month
If daily tasks and scheduled workflows become part of how you actually work, this is where you land once the free tier stops being enough.
You also get 3 execution modes to control how Polar spends those credits: Default, Lite, and Power, plus a Fast Responses toggle that burns through credits faster in exchange for speed. Leave it on Default until you know what a task actually needs. Save Power mode for the tasks that are genuinely long or complicated, that's where it earns the extra cost.
The Honest Part
What to hold off on for now
Polar gives you real control while it works: you can watch every click it makes in real time, take over the browser at any point, and it has guardrails meant to stop it from taking high-risk actions without asking you first. That's a genuinely good safety model.
But SOC 2 compliance is still listed as "in progress," not done. That's a specific, checkable thing, not vague caution. So for now:
Keep it on research, ops, and low-stakes tasks for now
Prospecting, scraping, drafting, scheduling, and monitoring are all a great fit. Save direct payments, sensitive client data, and anything tied to compliance requirements for after SOC 2 actually lands, and watch the task closely the first few times either way.
The Whole Thing in 5 Steps
Quick recap
Download and install. macOS only, from polarbrowser.com/download.
Sign in and watch onboarding. Required first, 3,000 free credits waiting for you.
Run your first task. Type it in plain English from a new tab, then watch it work.
Grab a template. 250+ ready prompts if you're not sure where to start.
Save it as a workflow. Turn the good ones into something that runs itself.
Work with Me
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