Introduction
Between heavier bot detection, stricter login flows, and more teams shipping AI agents that need to touch the real web, the difference between a browser platform that’s fast and debuggable versus one that’s just “available” shows up in your latency, your infra bill, and your incident queue.
In this article, you’ll get a practical comparison of Browserless and Anchor: what each product is trying to optimize for, where they differ, strengths and weaknesses, and which one to pick for your workflow.
What is Browserless?
Browserless is a hosted browser automation platform with multiple ways to run workloads on managed browsers:
- BrowserQL – a GraphQL-based automation API built around stealth and CAPTCHA handling.
- Browsers as a Service – a tool for connecting your existing Puppeteer or Playwright code over WebSocket.
- REST APIs – used for one-off operations like screenshots and PDFs.
It also supports region-specific endpoints (for example, US West, Europe UK, and Europe Amsterdam) and exposes standard connection URLs for automation libraries.
What is Anchor?
Anchor positions itself as an AI agentic browser automation platform: you build and manage browser-based automations for sites that don’t have APIs (or where API coverage is limited), and you can expose those workflows as simple API endpoints.
In practice, Anchor gives you two main interaction styles: create a remote browser session and connect via CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) with Playwright, and use “agentic tools” endpoints like “perform web task” (natural language) or “get webpage content”.
Browserless vs. Anchor: The key differences
Both products let you run real browsers in the cloud, but they optimize for different developer experiences.
Browserless is built around giving you choices: low-level control through Puppeteer/Playwright, higher-level control through BrowserQL, and simple REST calls when you just need artifacts like screenshots or PDFs.
Anchor leans harder into “agentic” workflows: prebuilt tools and an AI-driven task endpoint, plus the option to drop down to a CDP-connected session when you need full control.
The fastest for headless browser automation
Speed of job completion is an important factor for many teams looking for a browser automation solution. When it comes to the lowest latency and highest throughput for real automation code, Browserless has a measurable edge in the benchmark comparison we ran.
Browserless averaged 936.4ms to connect vs. Anchor at 5,582.4ms.
Browserless averaged 482.3ms to create a page vs. Anchor at 923ms.
Browserless averaged 166.2ms navigation vs. Anchor at 401.6ms.
Anchor was slower across all three measured phases (connect, new page, navigate) – and in fact the slowest of all four tools we benchmarked..
That difference matters if you open lots of short-lived sessions or you’re doing navigation-heavy crawls.
Browserless connection example (Puppeteer) looks like a standard endpoint swap:
Anchor’s “drop down to full control” flow is a two-step process: create a session, then connect over CDP:
The best for bot detection bypass
Bot detection bypass is where the product philosophies diverge.
Browserless has an explicit “stealth-first” lane: BrowserQL is designed to handle browser lifecycle, stealth configuration, and CAPTCHA solving, and it has a dedicated stealth route (/stealth/bql) you can hit directly.
A minimal BrowserQL call against the stealth endpoint looks like this:
Anchor also exposes anti-bot oriented capabilities, but they’re presented more as platform features and plan inclusions. For example, the pricing page lists “Cloudflare Verified Browser Agents” (starter) and “Anchor Chromium – Full stealth solution” (growth).
One practical point: even if your bypass is smart, it still runs on a browser. The same benchmark post shows Anchor was slower in connection, page creation, and navigation, which can translate into lower throughput for bypass-heavy workflows that retry often.
The best for web scraping services
There are two different needs people lump under web scraping:
- You want raw browser infrastructure so you can run your own scrapers reliably.
- You want a managed service where you describe the data and someone else ships the automation.
Browserless explicitly supports both. On the infra side, it has a scraping-focused product page and multiple API styles depending on how much control you want. On the managed side, it offers a “Data Delivery Service” (custom scripting service) where you hand over requirements and Browserless sets up the automation.
For example, a simple “just render and screenshot” scraping-adjacent flow can be a single REST call:
Anchor’s equivalent tends to be tool endpoints. For instance, “Screenshot Webpage” is documented as a legacy tool at POST /tools/screenshot with an API key passed as a query parameter.
Anchor also provides an AI-driven endpoint to perform various tasks, such as scraping web pages, which can be useful when you’re scraping to complete a workflow and return a result.
When to choose Browserless
Choose Browserless when:
- You care about throughput and baseline latency for real automation workloads (the benchmark gap is large, especially on connection time).
- You want multiple abstraction levels in one platform: BrowserQL for stealth-heavy flows, BaaS for your existing Playwright/Puppeteer code, and REST APIs for PDFs/screenshots.
- You need a dedicated bot-detection lane with stealth routes and BrowserQL capabilities like built-in CAPTCHA solving.
- You want a managed option like the Data Delivery Service (custom scripting service) so you can offload scraper buildout and maintenance.
- You need region-specific endpoints you can target directly (for example, to keep traffic close to your users or the target site).
When to choose Anchor
Anchor is a better fit when:
- You specifically want an AI-native “perform web task” API where you send a prompt and choose agent/provider knobs, rather than writing deterministic automation first.
- You want an official SDK pattern built around agent tasks, step callbacks, and schema-shaped output.
- You have a requirement for Cloudflare “Verified Browser Agents” as part of the platform’s packaging (as listed in Anchor’s starter plan), rather than implementing your own approach.
- You plan to spin up large batches of sessions with the same configuration (Anchor documents batch session creation up to 5,000, processed asynchronously).
If you’re evaluating solutions and the first question from procurement is “how much does Anchor cost?”, the answer is that it depends. Anchor’s pricing model combines a monthly plan with usage charges such as per-browser creation, per browser-hour, proxy usage per GB, and per AI step.
Conclusion
Browserless and Anchor both solve the same core problem: running real browsers remotely so you don’t babysit Chrome in containers. The difference is what they optimize for.
If you’re shipping deterministic automation (scraping, QA flows, document rendering) and performance plus anti-bot reliability are top priorities, Browserless is the stronger default – and the published benchmark data backs that up.
If your primary goal is to drive the browser through an AI-task abstraction (and you want that API as the first-class interface), Anchor’s agentic tools approach is closer to what you’re buying.