ArchiSteamFarm and Idle Master alternatives, honestly compared

Updated September 4, 2026 · 23,453 hours farmed on HourFarming so far

ArchiSteamFarm is free and excellent, Idle Master is dead, and HourFarming is the hosted option: card farming and hour farming from a browser tab, nothing to install, nothing to keep running. Here is the side-by-side, then the honest version of when each one is the right pick.

Start farming freeHow the card farmer works

What ArchiSteamFarm actually is

ArchiSteamFarm (ASF) is a free, open-source C# application from JustArchiNET, and it does one job well: farm Steam trading cards across as many accounts as you throw at it, from a single process, with no Steam client running in the background. It’s config-file driven — a JSON file per bot, plus an optional web frontend (ASF-ui) over its built-in IPC server — and it runs anywhere .NET does, official Docker images included. It’s actively maintained, with 2026 releases still landing regularly.

If your goal is card and badge farming, you want full control of the setup, and you don’t mind running a process yourself, ASF is a genuinely good tool. It’s not a toy — people run it seriously across dozens of accounts. For what it’s built to do, self-hosted and free, it earns its reputation.

Idle Master is dead. Idle Master Extended just joined it.

The original Idle Master, by jshackles, was discontinued back in 2016 — the project’s own page says so, and nothing has shipped since. Its most popular community fork, Idle Master Extended, kept the idea going for years. As of May 13, 2026, that repository was archived by its owner and is now read-only: no more commits, no bug fixes, no responses to open issues. That’s the actual reason people are searching for an Idle Master alternative right now — the tool a lot of them relied on isn’t coming back.

Archived doesn’t mean broken today — the last release still runs. It means no one is watching for the day a Steam API change breaks it, and no one will fix it when that happens.

Self-hosted vs hosted: the trade-off, honestly

Neither approach is wrong. They trade different costs for different conveniences, and the right one depends on what you’d rather deal with.

Self-hosted (ArchiSteamFarm, Idle Master Extended, or your own script):

• Free, with no cap on accounts beyond what your hardware can run.
• You hold your own session tokens — nothing leaves a machine you control.
• Fully configurable, down to the JSON.
• But: something has to stay on 24/7 — your PC, a VPS, a Raspberry Pi in a drawer.
• You handle updates, and you’re the one reading logs at 2am when it stops.
• Many accounts farming from one home IP can look like exactly what it is to Steam’s abuse systems.

Hosted (HourFarming):

• Nothing to install, patch, or keep running — it’s a browser tab.
• Reconnects, backoff, and stuck-session recovery are our problem, not yours.
• Live telemetry: per-account state, an hours odometer, the real worker log, which game is farming cards and how many drops it has left.
• But: it’s a paid service past the free tier, which caps at 100 farmed hours a month and is hours-only.
• You’re trusting a third party with your Steam accounts — worth deciding deliberately, not by default. See our guide to whether Steam hour boosting is safe before you do.

The free tier and paid plans are laid out on the pricing page if you want the exact numbers before deciding.

What HourFarming does differently

Unlike ASF or Idle Master Extended, there is nothing to download, compile, or keep patched. You open a browser, scan a QR code with the Steam Mobile app, and the fleet starts farming from HourFarming’s servers — your password never reaches us at all. Prefer a password login instead? That works too, encrypted with AES-256-GCM at rest. Steam Guard codes show up as a prompt in the panel, with a desktop notification, instead of sitting in a console window you forgot was open. Start a game yourself on your own PC and that account pauses automatically — no session conflict, no fight over the login — then resumes when you stop.

On cards it does what ASF does: reads the badges page, farms the game that still has drops and is past Steam’s ~3-hour threshold, one at a time, and moves on when it runs dry. Where it goes further is the hours side — when every set is farmed it drops back to your games list, up to 32 per account (Steam’s own ceiling), with per-game hour goals and a priority order for what tops your Recent Activity. You watch all of it live rather than tailing a log file over SSH. The full mechanics are in our Steam card farmer guide.

When ArchiSteamFarm is the better choice

If your actual goal is trading automation — badge crafting, ASF’s trade matcher completing sets across accounts, bot-to-bot trades — HourFarming is the wrong tool. It farms the drops and the hours and stops there: it doesn’t touch the Steam Market, doesn’t craft badges, doesn’t trade, and doesn’t sell cards. If your budget is genuinely zero and you’re comfortable running and maintaining a process yourself, ASF costs nothing and gives you more control than any hosted service will. And if you specifically want a tool you can read, audit, and modify — that’s open-source territory, and HourFarming isn’t: we’re closed-source and hosted, which is the whole point of what we’re selling.

Trading automation, self-hosted, free: ArchiSteamFarm. Cards and hours with nothing to run: HourFarming. Pick based on which job you’re actually doing. Either way, our free Steam tools — level calculator included — work without an account.

Questions people ask before switching