Core Concepts

Every automation you build in Skyvern Cloud is composed of the same nine building blocks. This page is a quick tour of each one — what it is, where you find it in the dashboard, and when to reach for it. If you’ve already poked around the dashboard, this map will tie what you’ve seen to the underlying concepts.

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Tasks

A Task is a single automation job. You describe what you want, Skyvern opens a browser and does it. You create tasks from the Discover page. Type your prompt and target URL into the input bar, pick an engine, and hit send. Tasks are the right starting point for one-off automations, ad-hoc data extraction, or quickly testing whether an idea is feasible before turning it into an agent. When you outgrow a single task — you need parameters, branching, loops, or to run the same flow on a schedule — graduate to an Agent.

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Agents

An Agent is a reusable automation built by chaining blocks together on a visual canvas. Agents are versioned, parameterized, and shareable across your team. You build them on the Agents page. Click any agent to open the editor, where blocks appear as connected nodes you can drag and configure. Use an agent when:

• The same flow needs to run repeatedly with different inputs
• You need to loop over a list, branch on a condition, or pass data between steps
• You want to schedule the automation to run on a cadence
• You want a teammate to be able to re-run it without re-deriving the logic

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Blocks

Blocks are the units an agent is built from. Each block performs one thing — navigate, log in, extract data, branch on a condition, send an email — and passes its output to the next block. In the agent editor, click the + button on any node to insert a new block. The picker groups every available block by category. There are 20+ block types organized into:

• Browser automation — Browser Task, Browser Action, Login, Extraction, Go to URL, Print Page
• Data and extraction — Text Prompt, File Parser
• Control flow — Loop, Conditional, AI Validation, Code, Wait
• Files — File Download, Cloud Storage Upload
• Communication — Send Email, HTTP Request, Human Interaction

Each block has its own configuration panel. The full reference, with every field for every block, lives at Agent Blocks.

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Runs

Every time a task or agent executes, Skyvern creates a Run — a record of what happened, with a video, screenshots, action log, and any extracted data. The Runs page is your history. Filter by status, search by run ID, click any row to drill in. Inside a run detail page you’ll find:

• Live viewer / recording — full video of the browser as it executed
• Actions — every step the agent took, with the LLM’s reasoning
• Output — the structured data extracted (matches the schema you defined)
• Code — auto-generated Python/TypeScript/cURL to reproduce this run via API
• Downloaded files — anything Skyvern saved, with signed URLs and checksums

A run can be queued, running, completed, failed, terminated, timed_out, or canceled. You’re billed per step — one screenshot + LLM decision + browser action.

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Browser sessions

A browser session is a live browser instance you keep open across multiple runs. Sessions preserve everything that lives in the browser — cookies, login state, cached pages, the current tab — so a follow-up task picks up exactly where the previous one left off. You manage sessions on the Browsers page. Create a session, run tasks against it, then close it when you’re done. Sessions are perfect when you want to:

• Log in once, then run a sequence of tasks behind that login
• Hand off a partially-completed flow between an agent and a human (Take Control)
• Keep a long-running automation warm without re-authenticating each step

Sessions live for 5 minutes to 24 hours (default 60 minutes). When the timer ends or you close it manually, the browser is destroyed and its state goes with it.

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Browser profiles

A browser profile is the persistent counterpart to a session. Where a session is a live browser that times out, a profile is a saved snapshot — cookies, auth tokens, local storage — that you can reload weeks later to skip the login flow entirely. Profiles are listed on the Browsers page under the Profiles tab. You create one from any completed run, then attach it to future runs to start in an already-authenticated state.

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Credentials

A credential is a stored login, credit card, or 2FA secret that Skyvern injects directly into the browser at runtime. Credentials are encrypted at rest and never sent to the LLM — the agent decides where the password field is, and the value is filled in via the browser layer. The Credentials page is where you manage them. Three credential types are supported:

• Password — username + password, optionally with a TOTP secret or email/SMS 2FA
• Credit card — card number, expiry, CVC, billing address
• Secret — any single value you want to keep out of the LLM context

You can also sync credentials from Bitwarden, 1Password, or Azure Key Vault instead of storing them in Skyvern.

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Schedules

A schedule runs an agent automatically on a recurring cadence. You set a cron expression and timezone, and Skyvern fires the agent at every interval — no manual trigger needed. Schedules are configured per agent. Open any agent’s actions menu and choose Schedule. Use schedules for daily reports, hourly monitoring, periodic data syncs, or anything that should “just keep running” without you remembering to click Run.

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Engines

An engine is the AI model Skyvern uses to drive the browser. Different engines have different strengths — speed, accuracy on complex pages, cost — and you can pick one per task or per block. The engine picker appears in API/SDK task requests and on supported browser-driven blocks in the agent editor. If you’re not sure, use the default. Move repeated automations into agents when you need scheduling, reusable parameters, or cached code replays.

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How they fit together

A typical day in the dashboard:

1. Prototype with a Task on the Discover page. Iterate on the prompt until it works.
2. Productionize by turning the prompt into an Agent with Blocks, Parameters, and a Schedule.
3. Persist state by saving a Browser Profile after the first authenticated run, so future runs skip login.
4. Audit every execution on the Runs page — recording, actions, output, downloaded files.

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Next steps