Browserless vs. Browserbase: How To Choose The Right Headless Browser

‍

Introduction

If you're doing serious browser automation in 2026 – scraping dynamic sites, wiring web agents into large language models, or running hundreds of headless browsers in production – you're basically choosing between two paths:

• Build and maintain your own browser infrastructure.
• Outsource that pain to a browser automation platform like Browserless or Browserbase.

Both options promise reliable headless browsers, bot detection resistance, and less operational complexity, but they make different trade-offs around self-hosted solutions, serverless infrastructure, debugging tools, and enterprise features.

In this guide, you'll get a comprehensive comparison of browserbase vs. browserless: what each platform actually does, their advantages and disadvantages, where their stealth features and web scraping capabilities differ, and when it makes sense to pick one over the other.

You'll see concrete examples for:

• Connecting Puppeteer via Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP).
• Using REST APIs for data extraction.
• Managing session management and browser state in production environments.

What is Browserless

Browserless is a managed headless browser platform that exposes Chrome (and other headless browsers) over WebSocket CDP endpoints and REST APIs so you don't have to run Chrome yourself.

Key features:

• BaaS ("Browsers as a Service") – you connect with Puppeteer or Playwright over wss://… and treat Browserless as a remote browser cluster.
• REST APIs for common web automation tasks – HTML /content, /screenshot, /pdf, /scrape, /download, /unblock, etc. – all with built-in JavaScript rendering.
• BrowserQL (BQL) – a GraphQL-based, stealth-first automation API that wraps headless browsers with human-like behavior and bot detection bypass primitives.
• Bot detection features – stealth routes, CAPTCHA solving, human-like input, residential proxies, and fingerprint randomization to help you avoid bot detection on tougher sites.
• Self-hosted and cloud options – an open-source Docker image plus a commercial license and enterprise-grade self-hosted deployments.
• Free tier and usage-based units – pricing is based on compute "units" and concurrencies with a free tier (1k units) and then paid plans, but you can also buy self-hosted licenses for maximum control.

In practice, Browserless feels like the thing you'd build yourself – a headless Chrome cluster with queueing, session management, proxy rotation, and stealth features.

What is Browserbase

Browserbase is a cloud-native browser automation platform built primarily for AI agents, web agents, and complex web automation workflows that need lots of headless browsers with debugging and stealth capabilities.

Key features:

• Serverless infrastructure – spin up thousands of browsers in milliseconds so you don't deal with servers.
• Session-centric API – the Sessions API gives you control over browser state, timeouts, keep-alive behavior, uploads, and session lifecycle via REST APIs and SDKs.
• Stealth Mode – Basic and Advanced Stealth Mode built on a custom Chromium with real browser fingerprints, tuned to avoid bot detection.
• Visual debugging tools – Session Inspector, session recordings, screenshots, and Live View give you real-time debugging tools and human oversight for flaky flows, login walls, and CAPTCHAs.
• AI-first integrations – "a web browser for AI agents" with native hooks for frameworks like CrewAI, Browser Use (computer-vision style automation), and Stagehand (their open source framework for natural-language web automation).
• Plans and free tier – Free, Developer, Startup, and Scale plans.

Both tools are headless browser engines with very flexible APIs, which can act as web browsers for AI agents and automation.

Browserless vs. Browserbase: The key differences

At a high level, both platforms run remote headless browsers that you drive with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, or their own APIs. Both handle JavaScript rendering, filling forms, and the usual automation tasks in real web browsers.

The differences show up in:

• How much control you want over browser infrastructure vs. how much operational overhead you're willing to accept
• Whether you care more about self-hosted solutions and data privacy, or about cloud native, serverless infrastructure
• How much you need bot detection resistance, stealth features, and proxy rotation built into the platform
• Whether you're building classic browser automation, web scraping, or AI-driven web agents with large language models and computer vision

Here's a comparison:

Now let's dig into some concrete "best for X" scenarios.

The best for headless browser automation

If you're already comfortable with Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium and you want to lift-and-shift existing scripts into a managed browser cluster, both tools work – but they feel different in day-to-day use.

Browserless: minimal changes to your current stack

With Browserless, you mostly swap your local launch call for connect to a remote CDP endpoint. Under the hood, it's still the Chrome DevTools Protocol, just running somewhere else.

Puppeteer example (Browserless):

// puppeteer + Browserless
import puppeteer from "puppeteer-core";

const TOKEN = process.env.BROWSERLESS_TOKEN!;

async function main() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
    browserWSEndpoint: `wss://production-sfo.browserless.io?token=${TOKEN}`,
  });

  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto("https://example.com", { waitUntil: "networkidle2" });

  const title = await page.title();
  console.log("Title from Browserless:", title);

  await browser.close();
}

main().catch(console.error);

You keep full control of selectors, class names, and browser state; Browserless just supplies robust browser infrastructure. This is ideal when you:

• Run complex workflows with custom logic.
• Care about full control over navigation, retries, and how brittle selectors are maintained.
• Might eventually move to a self-hosted cluster or hybrid model.

Browserbase: session-first, debugging-heavy automation

Browserbase starts with a session object: you create a browser session via the Sessions API, then attach Puppeteer to it with a connectUrl.

Puppeteer example (Browserbase):

// puppeteer + Browserbase
import puppeteer from "puppeteer-core";
import Browserbase from "@browserbasehq/sdk";

const API_KEY = process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY!;
const PROJECT_ID = process.env.BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID!;

const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: API_KEY });

async function main() {
  // 1. Create a remote session
  const session = await bb.sessions.create({
    projectId: PROJECT_ID,
    browserSettings: { timeout: 60 }, // seconds
  });

  // 2. Attach Puppeteer via Chrome DevTools Protocol
  const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
    browserWSEndpoint: session.connectUrl,
  });

  const [page] = await browser.pages();
  await page.goto("https://example.com", { waitUntil: "networkidle2" });

  console.log("Title from Browserbase:", await page.title());

  await browser.close();
  console.log(
    `Inspect this run at https://browserbase.com/sessions/${session.id}`,
  );
}

main().catch((err) => console.error(err));

Because every run is a session with an ID, you get default observability: logs, recordings, and debugging tools via the Session Inspector and Live View.

Verdict for headless browser automation

• Pick Browserless if you mainly want a stronger browser engine behind your existing automation with REST APIs as an extra superpower and the option to go self-hosted later.
• Pick Browserbase if you want a session-centric, serverless browser automation platform with observability, where non-technical users and non-technical team members can jump into Live View to debug or provide human oversight.

The best for bot detection bypass

Modern bot detection combines TLS fingerprints, browser fingerprints, behavioral analysis, and endpoint-level heuristics. Neither tool makes you invisible, but both provide serious stealth features.

Browserless bot detection stack

Browserless focuses on three key innovations around bot detection and stealth:

1. BrowserQL stealth routes – /stealth/bql routes that apply advanced fingerprint mitigation, entropy injection, and human-like behavior.
2. CAPTCHA solving – built-in CAPTCHA solving for supported providers, plus the ability to stream CAPTCHAs to users for manual solving in hybrid automations.
3. Proxy and residential proxies support – including rotation and configuration, so you can combine proxy rotation with stealth mode to avoid bot detection more reliably.

BQL example (high-level, simplified):

mutation ScrapeStats {
  goto(url: "https://example.com/dashboard", waitUntil: load) {
    status
    time
  }

  stats: querySelectorAll(selector: "#stats .stat-item") {
    label: innerText(selector: ".label")
    value: innerText(selector: ".value")
  }
}

This gives you a bot detection-aware browser automation layer that still lets you manage your own workflows, retries, and browser state.

Browserbase bot detection stack

Browserbase takes a slightly different approach:

• Basic Stealth Mode – handles "surface" checks like user agent strings, viewport, and simple visual CAPTCHAs.
• Advanced Stealth Mode – uses a custom Chromium build with real browser fingerprints, which often works better than randomly generated fingerprints.
• Proxy configuration – including geographic locations and proxy settings controlled per session, often combined with CAPTCHA solving in Startup/Scale plans.

Sessions can be configured with stealth and proxy settings directly in the API, giving you separation between session management and stealth configuration.

Simple curl sketch (Browserbase session with stealth and proxy):

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.browserbase.com/v1/sessions \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --header "X-BB-API-Key: $BROWSERBASE_API_KEY" \
  --data '{
    "projectId": "'"$BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID"'",
    "browserSettings": {
      "advancedStealth": true,
      "os": "mac"
    },
    "proxies": true
  }'

Verdict for bot detection bypass

• Choose Browserless if you want a stealth-first API (BrowserQL) plus flexible REST APIs and strong control for web scraping and automation, where you design the full anti-bot strategy.
• Choose Browserbase if your main workload is AI agents, where stealth mode and proxies are just part of session configuration, and you care a lot about replayability, debugging, and human oversight.

In both cases, you still need to respect the site's ToS. Avoid pretending to be crawlers like Googlebot and design flows that don't break compliance requirements in your industry.

The best for web scraping services

For many workloads, you don't just want basic web scraping – you want data extraction from highly dynamic sites with heavy JavaScript, logins, and CAPTCHAs. That's where full headless browsers beat traditional HTML-only scraping APIs.

Browserless for scraping and services

Browserless supports stateless REST APIs for screenshots, PDFs, and HTML content, which makes it easy to build your own web scraping services or internal scraping tools without writing full Puppeteer scripts for every use case.

Example: simple HTML extraction via REST (Browserless):

curl -X POST \
  "https://production-sfo.browserless.io/content?token=$BROWSERLESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/products",
    "waitForSelector": { "selector": ".product-card", "timeout": 5000 }
  }'

You can then feed the HTML into your own parser, a large language model, or a computer vision-style extractor if you're doing visual scraping.

Because Browserless can also be self-hosted, you can keep sensitive data and cookies inside your own VPC, which helps when you have stricter data privacy or compliance requirements.

Browserbase for scraping in AI workflows

Browserbase leans into web agents and "AI-native" scraping: instead of hand-rolling parsers, you can connect sessions to AI frameworks that use screenshots and DOM queries to drive navigation and extraction.

For example:

• Browser Use (Python) does screenshot-driven automation and traditional selectors under the hood.
• Stagehand (open source framework) uses natural language instructions to automate web pages, good for brittle selectors that change class names often.

This is ideal when you want:

• Agents that adapt to layout changes instead of breaking on every minor DOM tweak
• A browser automation platform where non-technical users can inspect runs visually and intervene when scraping fails
• Built-in session management, stealth mode, and debugging tools instead of stitching together separate tools

When to choose Browserless

Browserless is usually the better fit when you want maximum control over browsers and infrastructure with multiple integration options.

You should lean toward Browserless if the following is true:

You want self-hosted solutions or hybrid deployments

You can run their Docker image in your own cloud or on-prem for full control over network, IPs, and browser infrastructure, while still using the same APIs as their managed service. 

You prefer REST APIs for automation

The /content, /screenshot, /pdf, /download, /scrape, and /unblock endpoints make it trivial to hook web automation into existing REST-heavy backends or low-code tools.

You're building a web scraping service or internal platform

Stateless HTTP calls work well when you're orchestrating thousands of tasks and want clear isolation between them. You can also expose your own internal REST APIs on top, powered by Browserless as the underlying browser automation engine.

You care about bot detection control and want to tune behavior yourself

BrowserQL + stealth mode + residential proxies gives you a powerful toolbox to avoid bot detection while still deciding how aggressive to be per domain.

You have a strong DevOps and/or infra team

If you're comfortable managing infrastructure, a self-hosted cluster can minimize vendor lock-in and give you more control over data, logging, and compliance requirements. You can still use the hosted version for burst workloads or global geographic locations.

You want a single platform for many use cases

QA testing, PDF generation, screenshot services, classic automation, and AI-driven web agents can all live on the same automation platform without separate tools. 

In short: Choose Browserless when you're an expert engineering team that wants full control, self-hosted options, and flexible APIs for everything from basic automation to sophisticated anti-bot setups.

When to choose Browserbase

Browserbase offers a fully managed, cloud native browser automation platform tuned for AI, observability, and collaboration.

You should lean toward Browserbase if:

You're only concerned about AI agents

Browserbase's positioning and integrations are explicitly tailored for AI agents that browse the web, interact with forms, and retrieve data for large language models.

You'd rather not touch browser infrastructure at all

Browserbase runs on serverless infrastructure, and you treat browsers as ephemeral compute units instead of long-lived VMs. This is ideal for a small team or a startup plan that needs to scale without hiring a dedicated infra engineer for managing infrastructure.

You reequire low operational complexity

Advanced Stealth, proxy management, session management, and compliance-friendly architecture are built into higher tiers.

Stripe Billing integration and transparent usage reporting make it easier for enterprise finance teams to reason about cost.

In short: If your priorities are speed to market, minimal operational overhead, and a platform that your whole team (developers and non-developers) can use to debug and supervise web automation, Browserbase might be the better match.

Conclusion

Summarizing browserbase and browserless in a sentence each:

• Browserless is best when you want full-stack control of browsers, strong self-hosted options, and a mix of CDP + REST + GraphQL (BrowserQL) for everything from web scraping to advanced bot detection.
• Browserbase is best when you want a managed, serverless, AI-first browser platform with session management, stealth mode, and observability for AI agents.

Both platforms give you real headless browsers, robust developer tools, and serious anti-bot features. Your choice will mostly vary based on how much control vs convenience you want, whether your workloads are classic browser automation and data extraction, or AI-driven web agents, and how strongly you care about self-hosted solutions, data privacy, and compliance requirements.

If you're not sure yet, a pragmatic path is:

1. Try each free tier with a real production-like flow (login, navigation, data extraction).
2. Compare how much operational complexity you take on: retries, failures, concurrency, CAPTCHA handling.
3. See which debugging tools make you faster at shipping reliable web automation.

From there, pick the platform that lets your team focus on building value on top of the browser.

FAQs

What is the main difference between Browserless and Browserbase?

Browserless offers cloud hosting plus strong self-hosted options (Docker, commercial license) with flexible REST APIs and WebSocket CDP endpoints, making it ideal for teams that want full control over browser infrastructure. Browserbase is a fully managed, serverless platform focused on AI agents with built-in session management, debugging tools, and observability features.

Which platform is better for web scraping?

Browserless is generally better for traditional web scraping services due to its stateless REST APIs (/content, /screenshot, /scrape, /unblock) and self-hosted options that keep sensitive data in your own VPC. Browserbase is better suited for AI-driven scraping workflows where agents adapt to layout changes using frameworks like Stagehand or Browser Use.

Which platform is better for AI agents?

Browserbase is explicitly built for AI agents and applications, with native integrations for frameworks like Stagehand, Browser Use, and CrewAI. Browserless can also power AI agents via BrowserQL and CDP, but it's more general-purpose and suited for teams that want more control over their automation logic.

Can I self-host Browserless or Browserbase?

Browserless offers first-class self-hosted solutions with an open-source Docker image and commercial extensions, ideal for strict data privacy or compliance requirements. Browserbase focuses on managed services only—you can choose geographic locations and proxies, but you cannot run their stack yourself.

Which platform has better bot detection bypass?

Both platforms offer serious stealth features. Browserless provides BrowserQL stealth routes, CAPTCHA solving, residential proxies, and fingerprint randomization. Browserbase offers Basic and Advanced Stealth Modes with a custom Chromium build and real browser fingerprints. Choose Browserless if you want to tune anti-bot behavior yourself; choose Browserbase if you prefer stealth as a default configuration option.

Do Browserless and Browserbase have free tiers?

Yes, both platforms offer free tiers. Browserless provides approximately 1,000 free units per month. Browserbase offers a Free plan, with paid tiers including Developer, Startup, and Scale plans for additional features and usage.

Can I use Puppeteer and Playwright with both platforms?

Yes, both platforms support Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium via Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) connections. With Browserless, you connect directly to a WebSocket endpoint. With Browserbase, you create a session first via their Sessions API, then connect using the session's connectUrl.

‍