Browser automation APIs compared (2026) Pricing Compared

- A browser-hour at ten cents sounds like nothing - A session that idles while an LLM thinks can burn twenty minutes to do ninety seconds of work - The real unit is not the hour, it is the hour times your model latency - Teams routinely find the browser costs less than the tokens and more than they budgeted, at once - The bigger surprise is traffic - Every agent-oriented provider prices residential proxy bandwidth separately, near Bright Data's direct rate - Most of them resell the same pools - A scraping workload pulling images and fonts can move a gigabyte in an afternoon - Once you pay for proxy gigabytes anyway, compare Browserbase plus proxy gigabytes versus Bright Data all-in - That comparison is much closer than the sticker prices suggest - Watch the concurrency cliff: several vendors gate concurrency by plan tier - The constraint that forces an upgrade is parallelism, not usage - Three sessions on the entry plan is fine for development, useless for a crawl - Check the concurrency number before the hourly rate

Providers
13
Fields compared
3
Source confidence
33%
Last verified
2026-07-01 (2mo ago)
Re-verified
every 30 days
13 tools · verified 2mo ago
Airtop logoAirtopNatural-language browser API, describe the page, skip the selectors96.1

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
·
Free tier
Yes
Anchor Browser logoAnchor BrowserCloud browsers built around authenticated sessions and human takeover96.1

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Yes
Hyperbrowser logoHyperbrowserAgent-first browsers with hosted scrape, crawl and CUA endpoints96.1

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Yes
Kernel logoKernelFast-starting browsers plus a runtime for deploying browser agents96.1

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
·
Free tier
Yes
Steel.dev logoSteel.devOpen-source browser API for AI agents, hosted or self-run96.1

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Yes
Cloudflare Browser Rendering logoCloudflare Browser RenderingPuppeteer and Playwright bindings for Workers, plus REST render endpoints95.2

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
$0.09/browser-hour
Free tier
Yes
Browserbase logoBrowserbaseManaged headless browsers for AI agents, with Stagehand as the SDK94.6

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
$0.1/browser-hour
Free tier
Yes
Browserless logoBrowserlessSelf-hostable headless Chrome service; BrowserQL for bot-heavy sites86.8

Pricing

Pricing model
per-hour
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Partial
Apify logoApifyActor platform for scraping and agents, with Crawlee as the open-source core80.7

Pricing

Pricing model
per-credit
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Yes
Self-hosted Playwright logoSelf-hosted PlaywrightThe baseline: run Chromium in your own container and own everything75.3

Pricing

Pricing model
infrastructure
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
$0.03/browser-hour
Free tier
Yes
ScrapingBee logoScrapingBeeOne-call HTML API with JavaScript rendering and premium proxy tiers71.4

Pricing

Pricing model
per-credit
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Partial
ZenRows logoZenRowsScraper API plus a CDP scraping browser on a shared residential pool71.4

Pricing

Pricing model
per-credit
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
·
Free tier
Partial
Bright Data Browser API logoBright Data Browser APICDP browsers on a 70M+ residential IP network with challenge handling built in67.6

Pricing

Pricing model
per-gb
Per browser-hour (/browser-hour)
–
Free tier
Partial
yespartialnounknown
Sources shown beside each value · Learn how sourcing works
measured vendor-claimed community inferredExpand any row for the source, verification date, and caveat behind every cell.

Is the cheapest option the right one?

Price is one group of 3 fields out of 26. Everything else, features, limits, portability, how well any of it works for agents, is on the full browser automation apis compared (2026) comparison.

The pricing trap: per-hour looks cheap until the proxy bill lands

  • A browser-hour at ten cents sounds like nothing
  • A session that idles while an LLM thinks can burn twenty minutes to do ninety seconds of work
  • The real unit is not the hour, it is the hour times your model latency
  • Teams routinely find the browser costs less than the tokens and more than they budgeted, at once
  • The bigger surprise is traffic
  • Every agent-oriented provider prices residential proxy bandwidth separately, near Bright Data's direct rate
  • Most of them resell the same pools
  • A scraping workload pulling images and fonts can move a gigabyte in an afternoon
  • Once you pay for proxy gigabytes anyway, compare BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo plus proxy gigabytes versus Bright Data all-in
  • That comparison is much closer than the sticker prices suggest
  • Watch the concurrency cliff: several vendors gate concurrency by plan tier
  • The constraint that forces an upgrade is parallelism, not usage
  • Three sessions on the entry plan is fine for development, useless for a crawl
  • Check the concurrency number before the hourly rate

Anti-bot is a moving target and every published number is marketing

  • Bot detection vendors ship changes weekly
  • A provider that passes Kasada in March can fail it in April because a signal moved
  • Neither party will announce it
  • Vendor "99% success rate" and "unblockable" claims are unfalsifiable: no date, target list, sample size or definition
  • A single number is the wrong shape for the truth
  • Pass rates vary by detection vendor, target configuration, geography, and cold-versus-cookie sessions
  • A provider can be excellent against Cloudflare and hopeless against DataDome
  • Our panel reports per-site rates alongside the headline
  • While the column is empty: shortlist on capability, then run your own two-week bake-off against your actual targets
  • Log every failure with the challenge type, and re-run it quarterly
  • Nobody's benchmark, ours included, substitutes for testing against the specific site paying your bills

How to actually decide

  • Start with the target
  • Site you control, an internal tool, or a documentation crawl: use Cloudflare Browser RenderingCloudflare Browser Rendering logo or self-hosted Playwright
  • You are buying screenshots and PDFs, not evasion; the agent features are dead weight
  • Authenticated third-party site your agent must log into and stay in: buy persistence and takeover
  • Anchor BrowserAnchor Browser logo or BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo, with a human-in-the-loop path for the 2FA prompt that will appear
  • The failure mode is not blocking, it is a session dying at 2am with no visibility
  • Session replay should carry as much weight as pass rate
  • Protected commercial site you never control: buy the network, Bright Data or ZenRowsZenRows logo, priced per gigabyte
  • Design for retries rather than perfection
  • Do not put an agent framework on top until the fetch layer is reliable
  • If unsure, connect over raw CDP with Playwright from day one
  • That keeps every option here open for the price of an environment variable

How is this pricing data collected?

  • Capability fields were read off vendor documentation
  • Marked vendor-claimed with the doc URL where the docs are unambiguous
  • Marked inferred where a feature exists but the docs hedge
  • Marked unknown where we could not establish it without an account
  • Pricing uses the cheapest paid self-serve tier
  • Where a product is not billed by time (Bright Data per gigabyte, ApifyApify logo per compute unit, ScrapingBeeScrapingBee logo per credit), the per-browser-hour column is null
  • We do not convert, because it depends entirely on how heavy your pages are
  • The killer field, anti-bot pass rate, is deliberately empty
  • Planned panel: ten publicly reachable sites, plus two commodity storefronts as a control
  • One site each behind Cloudflare managed challenge, Akamai Bot Manager, DataDome, HUMAN/PerimeterX, Imperva, Kasada, F5 Shape and reCAPTCHA Enterprise
  • Fifty attempts per provider per site, cold sessions, no cookie reuse, from three geographies
  • Each provider's own default stealth configuration, nothing hand-tuned
  • Success means reaching a named DOM assertion within 30 seconds
  • A challenge that resolves itself counts; a challenge that stalls does not
  • We publish the pass rate with a 95% confidence interval, the raw logs, and the exact harness commit, and rerun monthly
  • Until that runs, every cell reads unknown
  • We will not print vendor-claimed success rates: that number is marketing everywhere it appears

Pricing questions

Is a hosted browser API cheaper than self-hosting Playwright?

  • Rarely on raw compute: a Chromium container costs a few cents an hour, hosted browsers start around ten
  • You are buying fingerprint maintenance, the proxy pool, the session viewer and the on-call
  • If targets do not block you and volume is steady, self-hosting wins on cost
  • It loses on the week you spend rebuilding a live view

What is the difference between Browserbase and Bright Data's Browser API?

  • BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo sells developer experience: contexts, live view, extensions, downloads, Stagehand, billed per browser-hour
  • Bright Data sells network access: seventy-odd million residential IPs with automatic challenge handling, billed per gigabyte
  • Agent teams pick BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo and add proxies when blocked
  • Scraping teams pick Bright Data and accept a thinner developer surface

Every tool compared on this page

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