Browserbase vs Steel

Choose Browserbase for the most mature managed browser platform with recording, stealth and proxies; choose Steel for an open-source, self-hostable browser API with no lock-in.

Editorial judgement last reviewed

Should I run agent browser sessions on Browserbase or Steel?

  • Both solve the same problem: running headless Chrome at scale is miserable.
  • Running it for AI agents is worse, since agents open sessions unpredictably, leave them open and get blocked.
  • BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo is the more complete product.
  • Sessions start fast and the observability is genuinely good: live view, full session replay, network logs.
  • Included: proxy rotation, stealth and fingerprinting, file downloads, extensions and agent-framework integrations.
  • Stagehand, its open-source library, abstracts "click the thing that looks like submit" and works on other backends.
  • Steel is the open-source alternative.
  • Smaller, more transparent API, sessions as a straightforward primitive, and full self-hosting.
  • That matters for data that can't leave your infrastructure, or to avoid depending on a startup.
  • For an agent product where browser reliability is someone else's problem, BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo is pragmatic.
  • The observability alone justifies it during debugging.
  • For control, cost predictability at volume or self-hosting, Steel fits better.
  • The open-source licence means your worst case is running it yourself, not rewriting.
  • Both beat maintaining your own Chrome fleet, a job that expands to fill any time you give it.

Which one should you pick?

Choose Browserbase if…

  • You want session replay and live view, the fastest debugging tool in this category.
  • You need stealth: managed fingerprinting, residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling as product features.
  • You want Stagehand's natural-language automation layer with the tightest integration.
  • Your agent framework already has a first-class BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo integration, most do.
  • You want concurrency you can scale without capacity planning.
  • You'd rather pay a vendor than own a Chrome fleet, valuing reliability over the per-hour rate.

Choose Steel if…

  • You want the option to self-host, for data residency, compliance or cost at volume.
  • You prefer an open-source dependency for something this load-bearing.
  • You want a small, comprehensible API rather than a platform with opinions.
  • Per-session hosted pricing has become the largest line in your infrastructure bill.
  • You already run container infrastructure, so one more service is cheap.
  • You want to read the source when something behaves strangely, not file a ticket.

Observability is the feature you'll care about at 2am

  • Browser automation fails in hard-to-reproduce ways.
  • The selector worked yesterday; a cookie banner appeared only for this region.
  • The site served a different layout to a headless user agent; the agent clicked something not there yet.
  • That's why session recording is the most valuable feature here, and BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo's strongest card.
  • Live view turns "the agent is stuck" into a five-second diagnosis.
  • Replay lets you scrub a failed run to the exact frame where the page diverged.
  • Network logs tell you whether the request or the parse failed.
  • Steel gives you the browser and expects your own observability.
  • You can attach the Chrome DevTools Protocol, capture screenshots and log what you need.
  • But that's work you'll do during an incident rather than before one.
  • Weight this heavily if users report "it didn't work" with no detail.
  • It matters much less for deterministic automation against a site you control.

Stealth, blocking and the arms race you're joining

  • Automation against sites you don't control eventually meets bot detection.
  • Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome and PerimeterX all fingerprint headless browsers.
  • Signals are numerous: TLS fingerprints, canvas and WebGL rendering, timing, missing APIs, IP reputation.
  • BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo treats this as a product surface.
  • Managed fingerprinting, residential proxy pools, CAPTCHA solving, and a team keeping up as detection changes.
  • That team is the real value: the arms race never stops and staying current is a continuous cost.
  • Steel gives you proxy support and browser configuration, leaving the strategy to you.
  • Self-hosting means sourcing your own proxies and maintaining your own evasion, doable but a project.
  • If the target site is your own or your customer's, none of this matters, don't pay for it.
  • Evading bot detection may breach terms of service and raise legal questions beyond engineering.
  • Get advice before building a business on it, not after.

Pricing shape: per-hour sessions and the idle problem

  • Both bill roughly by browser time in hours, with concurrency limits by plan.
  • The trap in both cases is idle sessions.
  • An agent navigates, extracts, then the model thinks for twenty seconds while the browser bills.
  • Multiply by a few thousand sessions a day and idle time can exceed active time.
  • Mitigations are the same everywhere.
  • Aggressive session timeouts, closing sessions in a finally block, and reusing one session across steps.
  • At low volume, hosted pricing is obviously correct, a handful of sessions costs less than an hour of your time.
  • The crossover comes when browser hours become a top-three infrastructure line.
  • That's where Steel's self-hosting changes the maths: cost becomes containers and bandwidth, not a per-hour rate.
  • The price is owning the operations.
  • Do the arithmetic with real numbers, including unmeasured idle time.
  • Most teams underestimate session duration by a factor of two or three.

The agent-shaped requirements nobody mentions

  • Browsers for CI test suites and browsers for AI agents have different requirements.
  • This category exists because of that difference.
  • Session persistence matters more than in testing.
  • An agent may log in once and reuse that authenticated context across many steps and minutes.
  • Check how each persists cookies and local storage, and whether contexts save and resume.
  • That's the difference between one login and a hundred.
  • Structured extraction matters: agents need cleaned text, an accessibility tree or a simplified DOM.
  • Not two hundred kilobytes of minified markup.
  • Both have answers; Stagehand's is the more developed and works against multiple backends.
  • Concurrency matters: one user's request can spawn ten parallel sessions.
  • Check the plan's concurrency limit and, more importantly, what happens when you exceed it.
  • A queue is fine; an error your agent doesn't handle is not.
  • Check timeout defaults: an orphaned session pool nobody notices until the bill is the common incident.

Frequently asked questions

Can I just run Playwright myself?

  • Yes, and for a fixed set of sites at low concurrency you probably should.
  • These platforms earn their money on scale, bot detection and observability.
  • You feel all three at once when an agent misbehaves in production at 3am.

Does Stagehand only work with Browserbase?

  • No. Stagehand is open source and runs against other backends, including local Chrome.
  • The BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo integration is the tightest because they maintain it.
  • But adopting the library doesn't lock you in.

Which is better for scraping?

  • BrowserbaseBrowserbase logo, if you need stealth and proxies as managed features.
  • For sites you own or have permission to automate, Steel is cheaper and simpler.
  • Check terms of service and applicable law before building a business on the first case.

Can I self-host Browserbase?

  • No, it's a hosted platform.
  • Self-hosting is Steel's distinguishing feature.
  • It's the reason to pick Steel when data residency or air-gapped operation is a requirement.

How do I keep browser costs down?

  • Close sessions in a finally block and set aggressive timeouts.
  • Reuse one session across an agent's steps instead of opening one per action.
  • Measure idle time: idle sessions are the largest avoidable cost here by a wide margin.
All browser automation apis, compared field by field