Browserbase

Browserbase — Managed headless browsers for AI agents, with Stagehand as the SDK. Browserbase runs Chromium sessions you connect to over CDP, plus the surrounding machinery agents actually need: reusable contexts, an embeddable live view, extension loading and a download API. Stagehand, its open-source TypeScript SDK, layers model-driven act/extract calls over ordinary Playwright so you can drop back to selectors whenever the model gets it wrong. The infrastructure itself is closed and priced by the browser-hour, with residential proxy bandwidth billed separately. Built by Browserbase, Inc.. Founded 2024. Series B.

We track it in 1 comparison — Browser APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Session replay — Yes, which only 4 of 13 tools here manage.
• Browser regions — us-east, us-west, eu-central, ap-southeast, the best figure of the 9 here.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Per browser-hour — $0.1 /browser-hour, the weakest of the 3 here. Self-hosted Playwright records $0.03 /browser-hour.
• GitHub stars — 15,000, 3rd of 5. Self-hosted Playwright records 73,000.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 25 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Browserbase, and 12 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-07-01. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Airtop. Browserbase is ahead on CDP endpoint (Yes against Partial) and Session replay (Yes against Partial). Airtop takes Agent API (Yes against Partial) and Human handoff (Yes against Partial). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Browserbase alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Browserbase, Inc.

Founded

2024

Funding

Series B

Fields we track

25 of 26

Last verified

2026-07-01

The most complete developer surface in the category and the one to beat for agent work — contexts, live view, extensions and downloads all exist and all work. You pay a premium for that, and you still buy proxy bandwidth separately, so it is not the cheap option for scraping.

Session replay

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Per browser-hour

$0.1 /browser-hour3rd of 3

Inferred

Cold start

1 s1st of 2

Inferred

Browser regions

us-eastus-westeu-centralap-southeast1st of 9

Inferred

Stealth mode

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

CDP endpoint

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Session persistence

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

CAPTCHA solving

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Browserbase is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Agents that need to stay logged in across runs.
• Teams that want Stagehand's act/extract without losing raw Playwright.
• Anyone who will need a human to take over a stuck session.
• Session replay is your binding constraint. Browserbase records Yes, which only 4 of the 13 tools in the Browser APIs roster do. We define that field as post-hoc recording of a finished session — video, rrweb or trace — retrievable via API or dashboard.
• Browser regions is your binding constraint. Browserbase records us-east, us-west, eu-central, ap-southeast, the best figure in the Browser APIs roster. We define that field as geographies where the browser itself runs, not proxy exit countries.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Per browser-hour. Browserbase records $0.1 /browser-hour, the weakest of the 3 tools in the Browser APIs roster. Self-hosted Playwright records $0.03 /browser-hour on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• GitHub stars. Browserbase records 15,000, 3rd of 5 in the Browser APIs roster. Self-hosted Playwright records 73,000 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 1 of the 26 fields we track for Browserbase are still blank: Anti-bot pass rate. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.