A cloud-based headless browser platform that lets AI agents operate the web the way a person does. It has been offered by Browserbase, Inc. (United States) since 2024. Instead of running your own browser servers, you call an API and get a real Chrome session, and you can run thousands of browsers at once. It connects to existing automation frameworks — Playwright, Puppeteer, and Selenium — so you can migrate by simply pointing your current scripts at a remote endpoint. The platform takes over the most painful parts of web automation: automatic CAPTCHA solving, proxy management, stealth mode, and session recording.
Key Features
- Drop-in support for existing frameworks: Works with Playwright, Puppeteer, and Selenium. Instead of launching a browser locally, you connect to a remote session, so existing automation code needs almost no rewriting
- Automatic CAPTCHA solving and proxies: Paid plans include automatic CAPTCHA solving as standard, and each plan bundles a set amount of residential proxy bandwidth. You no longer need to hand-build workarounds for the steps that trip bot detection
- Stealth mode and session persistence: Stealth mode adjusts the browser fingerprint to reduce detection, and login state (cookies and sessions) can be preserved and reused in later runs
- Live view and session recording: You can watch a running browser in real time, and replay recordings and logs after a run finishes. Being able to see exactly where an agent stalled cuts debugging effort substantially
- Stagehand for AI browser automation: The company’s open-source automation framework. Rather than writing CSS selectors, you can mix natural-language instructions such as “click the login button” with conventional code
- Search / Fetch APIs and a model gateway: The same platform offers a web search API built for agents, a Fetch API that converts URLs into HTML, JSON, or Markdown, and a model gateway that lets you call multiple AI models through a single key
- MCP support: Browser control can be invoked directly from AI assistants over the Model Context Protocol, so it can be wired into Claude and other MCP-capable clients
Pricing
| Plan | Monthly price | Concurrent browsers | Included browser hours | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3 | 1 hour | 15-minute session limit, 1,000 search and 1,000 fetch calls, 7-day data retention |
| Developer | $20 | 25 | 100 hours (then $0.12/hour) | Automatic CAPTCHA solving, 1 GB proxies (then $12/GB) |
| Startup | $99 | 100 | 500 hours (then $0.10/hour) | 5 GB proxies (then $10/GB), 10,000 fetch calls, 30-day data retention |
| Scale | Contact sales | 250+ | Usage-based | Advanced stealth mode, enterprise options such as HIPAA (BAA), DPA, and SSO |
Browser hours, proxy bandwidth, API calls, and model tokens are all usage-based, with anything beyond the included amount billed on top. A sensible approach is to confirm the behavior you need on the Free plan, then pick a tier by working backward from the concurrency you require.
Pricing is current as of August 2026. Please check the official site for the latest information.
Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- Fully outsources browser infrastructure work — servers, dependencies, memory leaks, and scaling
- Existing Playwright and Puppeteer code can be migrated with minimal changes
- CAPTCHA solving, proxies, and stealth — the areas that turn into a swamp when built in-house — come as standard
- Live view and session recording let you trace what a failing agent actually did
- A free plan is available, so small-scale validation costs nothing
⚠️ Cons
- Cloud-only; there is no self-hosting option
- Billing spans browser hours, proxies, API calls, and model tokens, which makes monthly costs hard to forecast
- The free plan’s 1 browser hour and 15-minute session cap make it a trial allowance rather than something you can run on
- Heavy workloads such as large-scale scraping can accumulate usage charges quickly
- Respecting a target site’s terms of service and robots.txt remains the user’s responsibility; the platform does not take that on for you
Comparison with Similar Services
| Criteria | Browserbase | Browserless | Steel.dev | Hyperbrowser |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Browser infrastructure for AI agents | Long-established headless browser service | Open-source browser API | Lightweight, agent-focused platform |
| Self-hosting | Not available (cloud only) | Available | Available | Not available |
| Framework support | Playwright / Puppeteer / Selenium | Playwright / Puppeteer and others | Playwright / Puppeteer | Playwright / Puppeteer |
| Distinctive strength | Stagehand, Search / Fetch APIs, observability tooling | Track record and breadth of protocol support | Open source, high flexibility | Emphasis on anonymity and concurrency |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Because each vendor structures pricing differently, side-by-side numbers are hard to compare. In practice, narrowing the choice by three questions — required concurrency, whether you need self-hosting, and whether you bring your own proxies — is the more workable approach.
Who Is It For
- Developers writing automation in Playwright or Puppeteer who are losing time to server operations and scaling
- Teams building AI agents that browse and operate the web without wanting to assemble browser infrastructure from scratch
- Anyone whose automation keeps breaking against CAPTCHAs and bot detection
- Products already in the operations phase that need to trace agent failures through recordings and logs
- People who want to drive a browser directly from an MCP-capable client
Summary
Browserbase answers the question of where browsers should run in the age of AI agents. Existing automation frameworks work as-is, and CAPTCHA handling, proxies, stealth, and observability all arrive as one package, so the time saved compared with building your own is considerable. The trade-offs are that it is cloud-only and that its many usage-based line items make costs hard to read. The dependable path is to confirm on the free plan that your use case runs reliably, then choose a paid tier once you know the concurrency you actually need.