ChatGPT Atlas Alternatives: What's Left After August 9

ChatGPT Atlas was scheduled to stop working on August 9, 2026. Two days later, OpenAI's own deprecation page still says "scheduled", the release notes never mentioned the date again, and the October 2025 launch post still shows a "Download for macOS" button that lands on a page where Atlas isn't offered.

This is for anyone who put Atlas on their machine, used it, and now has to replace it. By the end you'll know which ChatGPT Atlas alternatives you can install today, what doesn't travel with you, and which half of the replacement is free. That last one is not the half I would have guessed on August 4, and it's the part that decides what this switch costs you.

The plan was to give all three the same task and print three sets of numbers. I got none of them, and the reason turned out to be worth more than the numbers.

The short version: what to do now

Export whatever your Atlas install still holds, then install Perplexity Comet if you want a working AI browser today. OpenAI only ever said Atlas "is scheduled to stop working", and its own pages no longer offer a download. Comet is free and worldwide, no waitlist. Gemini in Chrome, the other name in every roundup, isn't listed for a single European Union country. And the agent capability people are mourning was never on the free plan in Atlas: in the replacement, what's free is the browser you sit and watch, not the one that works without you.

What OpenAI actually said, and what doesn't come with you

OpenAI is deprecating the browser and keeping the capability, in its own words: "We're deprecating Atlas and moving browser-based agentic capabilities into ChatGPT and Codex." Agentic just means the assistant can take actions on a page for you, not only read it. For heavier work OpenAI points at the new ChatGPT desktop app, and for lighter help while you browse, at the ChatGPT Chrome extension or sidebar. I couldn't find a blog post about any of it: the announcement lives in a help center article and one release-notes entry, which is part of why people missed it.

The help center is precise about your data, and precise in a way that should worry you. Bookmarks "will not transfer automatically", so you export them to an HTML file and import that into Chrome. Open tabs and browser history "may not transfer automatically" either, and on cookies it only promises that "Atlas will provide export options where available". One release-notes entry from July 9 is more generous, saying you can export cookies and passwords to the ChatGPT desktop app, but that sentence appears nowhere in the help article. Where the help article is unambiguous is the troubleshooting section: "Cookies and active sessions cannot be imported into another browser."

Read that again with a browser agent in mind. Logged-in sessions are exactly what an agent works with, and they're the one thing that can't move. Your ChatGPT chat history sits separately and stays, so it's the browser that empties out. Exporting the rest is a job you can finish in a day, and the window for it is whatever is left of your own install.

The newest build on the update server went out fifteen days after the shutdown was announced

Version 1.2026.189.1 was published on July 24, 2026, fifteen days after OpenAI announced that the browser would stop working, and on August 3 it was still the newest thing the update server offered. Atlas updates itself through Sparkle, the standard auto-update system for Mac apps, and Sparkle reads a public file called an appcast: a plain list of the versions on offer. Anyone can read it. So I did.

$ curl -s https://persistent.oaistatic.com/atlas/public/sparkle_public_appcast.xml
  <title>1.2026.189.1</title>
  <pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
  <sparkle:criticalUpdate/>
  ... 3 items total, all three flagged criticalUpdate

$ curl -sI .../ChatGPT_Atlas_Desktop_public_1.2026.189.1_20260724200710000.dmg
HTTP/2 200
content-length: 269967267
last-modified: Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:12:42 GMT

What isn't in that file is any notice at all: no end-of-life field, nothing that tells a machine or a person that this browser stops working on August 9. I ran both commands again on August 11, two days after the date. Nothing had moved: three items, all three flagged as a critical update, the 270 MB installer still answering 200, and 1.2026.189.1 from July 24 still on top, published sixteen days before the date the feed never mentions. The feed itself was last modified on July 27.

The copy on my own Mac is version 1.2025.344.9, built December 22, 2025, set to check every 3600 seconds. It last managed to ask on May 30, 2026, because Sparkle only checks while the app is open and I stopped opening it. If you were waiting for Atlas to warn you about your bookmarks, look at what you were waiting on.

The same pattern sits on OpenAI's own site. On August 11 the deprecation article carries the stamp "Updated: 26 days ago", which puts the last edit around July 16, weeks before the date it describes, and it still calls the shutdown scheduled. The ChatGPT release notes are current, with an entry from August 10, and not one entry confirms any of it happened. The October 21, 2025 launch post has no deprecation notice on it at all and still offers "Download for macOS", pointing at chatgpt.com/atlas, which now lands on a page offering the ChatGPT desktop app, the Chrome extension, iOS, Android and ChatGPT Classic. No Atlas.

I've shipped enough software to recognize what this is: somebody owned the announcement, and nobody owned the aftermath.

Where the agent went, and which half of it is free

The capability came back as two browsers inside the ChatGPT desktop app, and the free half is the one you have to sit and watch. The July 9 release notes describe that app in one sentence: "It combines Chat for questions and conversation, Work for research and finished deliverables, and Codex for software development in one app." It's global, on macOS and Windows, and if you were a Codex user, the update turned your Codex app into it.

The first browser is built in and runs on your machine. OpenAI describes it like this: "You and ChatGPT can see the same page, and ChatGPT can work across tabs, download files, or wait while you sign in." It supports "richer sign-in, autofill, password management, extensions, downloads, and navigation", and it keeps its own browser state instead of borrowing your Chrome profile. Note who does the signing in. You do, and it waits: "Enter credentials only in the browser, never in the chat."

The second is the cloud browser, which runs remotely while you do something else. It fills in forms: "It can navigate public pages, enter information in supported fields", with "Contact businesses for quotes through public forms" as OpenAI's own example. What it can't do is get through a front door. "At launch, cloud browser works only on public pages. It does not accept credentials, use autofill or password managers, sign in to websites, or complete payments. If a site requires one of those steps, the task stops." On a CAPTCHA or a site that blocks automated access the wording goes softer: the task "may stop", and ChatGPT can hand the page back to you so you can see what happened.

So the question that decides your setup isn't which browser has an agent. It's who logs in. Gemini's auto browse is the one product of the three that claims the middle: "With your permission, Gemini in Chrome can get help from Google Password Manager to sign in to sites for you." It's also the one I can't have, for reasons two sections down.

Which half you pay for is the part I got wrong twice. Atlas gave the browser away and never gave the agent away, and OpenAI's launch post from October 21, 2025 has both halves in it: "ChatGPT Atlas is launching worldwide on macOS today to Free, Plus, Pro, and Go users", and then "Agent mode in Atlas is available today in preview for Plus, Pro, and Business users." I read the whole run of the Atlas release notes, through the final entry on March 10, 2026, and no entry ever widens that second list. Every agent update in there is about behavior and bugs.

Then the successor moved the line, and I had that wrong from August 4 until I re-read the pricing page on August 11. The July 9 release notes said ChatGPT Work would go to paid plans "except Free and Go", so I wrote that the paywall stayed put. The pricing page says otherwise: built-in browser "Yes" on Free, Go, Plus and Pro, and ChatGPT Work listed as "Limited (desktop app)" on Free and Go against "Desktop, web, and mobile" on Plus and Pro. The paywall didn't disappear. It moved to the cloud browser.

Let's do the math, in the euros that page shows a Dutch visitor on August 11: Free is EUR 0, Go is EUR 8, Plus is EUR 23, Pro starts at EUR 103, and Business is EUR 21 per user on an annual plan or EUR 26 month to month. If you were a free-plan Atlas user, you can sit next to a browser agent for the same EUR 0 you were paying, and Comet does that too. If you were paying for agent mode, you're buying something different now: not the right to use an agent, but an agent that doesn't need you in the room.

Perplexity Comet: the one you can install today

Comet is the only one of the two named alternatives I can install today from the Netherlands. Perplexity's launch post is unambiguous: "Today we are releasing the Comet browser to the world, for free." The landing page still says "Available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android", the changelog's most recent entry is August 4, 2026, and there are nine Comet articles in the help center. Somebody is still working on this one, which after the week Atlas just had is worth writing down.

One detail matters more now than it did in July: Comet imports bookmarks, history and passwords from another browser. What no import fixes is the cookie problem, because Atlas won't hand those over to anything. Plan on typing your logins in once, yourself.

The paid layer is small and clearly stated. Comet Plus is "a $5 standalone subscription" in Perplexity's own words, and it comes with Perplexity Pro and Max. Max is "$200/monthly or $2000/annually" and carries "the highest weekly limit on browser agent queries available across all subscription tiers", which tells you exactly what Perplexity thinks the scarce resource is. The catch on the free tier is a daily allowance of Pro Searches and Deep Research rather than unlimited agent work, so a long session runs out on you. Perplexity doesn't publish the number.

I did not install Comet on this machine for this article, and I'm not going to dress that up. What I can tell you comes from the day I ran three browser agents, Comet among them, on real errands, in I handed an AI browser agent my daily tasks. They handled the finding and comparing without much trouble, and I kept my own hand on every step that spent money.

Gemini in Chrome: not an option where I live

Gemini in Chrome is the second name on every alternatives list, and Google's own availability page, which I read again on August 11, 2026, still doesn't list a single European Union country. I went down that list line by line this time. No Netherlands, no Germany, no France, no Spain, and no Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Turkey either. The United States is on it, and the United Kingdom. Google's requirement is that you be "in a supported region", and it adds: "We're gradually releasing Gemini in Chrome, so it might not be available to you just yet." A month after the Atlas announcement, "just yet" hasn't moved an inch.

The agentic part is narrower still, and the fine print is worth reading before you pay. Auto browse, the mode that works through multi-step chores and the only piece that does what the Atlas agent did, is "currently rolling out in preview in the U.S." per Google's own announcement. Google's requirements add the rest: you have to "Be 18 or over and in the US", on a personal account with Google AI Pro or Ultra, with your device language set to English, and not on an iPhone or iPad. Then it counts your work: "up to 20 requests per day" on AI Pro, "up to 200 requests per day" on Ultra. Read from a Dutch IP address on August 11, those plans price at EUR 21.99 for AI Pro and from EUR 99.99 for Ultra, and the cheaper AI Plus tier at EUR 4.99 isn't on the auto browse list at all. Google's July 30, 2026 post took AI Pro to more than 160 countries and still kept auto browse in the U.S. That EUR 21.99 buys AI Pro in Amsterdam without it.

What our two Atlas tests still tell you

They tell you where a browser agent stops, and that line moves with you to whatever you install next, because the web drew it and not OpenAI. A day of ordinary errands drew it at the register: I stopped the agents before anything that spent money, because of prompt injection, where hidden instructions on a page get read by the agent as if you'd typed them.

Live job application forms drew the line at identity instead. A Greenhouse-hosted form had nine form controls: an agent can type into seven, one wants a file off your disk, and one is a hidden reCAPTCHA field that isn't a question at all, which is where an agent stops on a real application.

Which ChatGPT Atlas alternatives should you pick?

Pick Comet if you want a full AI browser working today, and the ChatGPT desktop app if you're already living inside OpenAI's tools. The whole field, as of August 11, 2026.

My honest take

The shutdown itself doesn't bother me. OpenAI built the agent capability, learned that people won't switch browsers to get it, and moved it to where those people already are. That's defensible, and expensive if you're the person who did switch.

What bothers me is everything after the announcement. Two days past the date, the deprecation page still calls it scheduled and the release notes have moved on to other features. Eight great alternatives, say the roundups. Count the ones you can run, from where you live, at the price you were paying, and the list gets very short.

Bottom line: export what your install still holds, install Comet, and don't pay for a cloud browser until you've written down one task that genuinely runs without you.