Tampermonkey: Alternative

Here’s an interesting, story-driven write-up on Tampermonkey alternatives, framed as a user’s quest for the perfect userscript manager. It started with a single pop-up. Not an ad—worse. A nag screen inside my developer tools: "Tampermonkey has been updated. Please review the new permissions."

So I went looking for alternatives. Not because Tampermonkey is bad—it's brilliant. But because no brilliant tool should become the only tool you trust.

Violentmonkey is the ethical hacker’s Tampermonkey. It does 95% of what Tampermonkey does, but with zero proprietary bloat. The permissions model is stricter, the update checks are transparent, and the code is lean enough to run on a Raspberry Pi. tampermonkey alternative

Greasemonkey is the original. Created in 2005, it birthed the entire userscript ecosystem. But while Tampermonkey added bells and whistles, Greasemonkey stayed minimalist— too minimalist for some.

I clicked "OK" for the tenth time that month. But this time, I paused. A nag screen inside my developer tools: "Tampermonkey

And Tampermonkey? It's still installed. Still updated. Still capable. But now it's no longer the default. It's just one option among many—exactly how userscripts were meant to be. The web is your canvas. Don't let a single extension hold the only brush.

AdGuard’s browser extension isn't just for blocking ads. It has a hidden userscript engine that supports most Tampermonkey APIs. The killer feature? It runs before the page loads. Tampermonkey waits for DOM readiness; AdGuard injects at the network level. But because no brilliant tool should become the

The 4.0 rewrite broke thousands of scripts by removing GM_* APIs. The community panicked. Many left. But if you only need simple DOM manipulation and hate feature creep, Greasemonkey is still a masterpiece of focus.