A Firecrawl alternative where you control the browser
Browserless gives your code a live browser session over Puppeteer, Playwright, or CDP, with stealth and CAPTCHA solving built in, for runs that last an hour and state that survives for days.
Browserless
Browser infrastructure you connect to and control. Real headless browsers, Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, WebKit and Edge, over Puppeteer, Playwright, CDP, REST, or BAP, our stealth-first SDK, with stealth, CAPTCHA solving, and proxies built in, in our cloud or on the licensed image in your own network.
Firecrawl
A data extraction platform built for AI pipelines. Scrape, Crawl, Map, Search and Monitor return clean markdown or structured JSON, and Interact adds browser control by prompt, by Playwright code, or over a CDP connection.
How Browserless and Firecrawl compare
Both handle JavaScript rendering on dynamic websites. Here is how the key features compare, with the benefits of each highlighted.
Firecrawl details reflect its published documentation and pricing as of September 2026. The product moves fast, so check Firecrawl's current pages before deciding.
Browserless vs. Firecrawl
Firecrawl is a web scraping tool that turns web pages into clean, LLM-ready markdown, and its Interact feature can click, fill forms, and log in. Browserless is the browser underneath. You drive Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, WebKit or Edge over Puppeteer, Playwright or CDP, with stealth and CAPTCHA solving on the same connection.
Both hand you a session you can drive for up to an hour. Browserless solves CAPTCHAs automatically and runs the whole stack inside your own infrastructure, while Firecrawl's Agent, Browser and Interact routes are Cloud only. Choose Firecrawl to scrape websites into clean text at volume. Use Browserless when the job has a login, a challenge page, or a compliance boundary.
The benefits of a browser you control
Extraction APIs are excellent at reading pages. When AI agents and automation workflows need live web data behind a login or across a long session, you need the browser itself.
localStorage, and cache stay alive for days across full browser restarts, so a long journey does not need to restart from the login page.browserless_agent MCP tool holds one browser session across an agent's turns rather than opening and closing a browser per tool call, so web search agents and multi-step AI workflows keep their login and their place.When Firecrawl is the better choice
Firecrawl is a fast-growing open-source scraper and a staple of AI web scraping stacks for a reason. Here are the challenges it can help you solve.
Turning pages into LLM-ready text
If your RAG pipeline wants clean markdown from a lot of URLs, Firecrawl does that better than a raw browser will, because the product is built for extraction quality. Schema-based extraction can extract structured data too, when you want fields instead of prose.
Scheduled crawls and change monitoring
Web crawling is a focus of the product: the crawl endpoint walks a whole site, and the Monitor endpoint watches for new matching content and fires webhooks or email.
Getting started in one request
A single call automates data extraction, returning markdown for a URL with no browser concepts involved. A browser you drive has a steeper learning curve than that; if one call solves your problem, browser infrastructure underneath is unnecessary complexity.
The whole workflow, challenge pages included
Most logged-in journeys do not fail at the login form. They fail at the challenge page in front of it. Once you are through, the rest is ordinary work, a wait, a decision based on what came back, a form, a pagination loop, and a download, all sharing one authenticated browser.
Browserless keeps the session on our infrastructure and the control flow in yours. Your code runs in your own process against a live browser, so a breakpoint still works, and the solving happens on the same connection rather than in a separate service you wire up.
- Automatic CAPTCHA solving on the same connection, across 21 challenge types including Cloudflare, DataDome and PerimeterX.
- Authenticated Profiles restore a login into as many parallel sessions as you need, with changes staying local to each.
- The same session, stealth and solving run on your own infrastructure with the licensed image, air-gapped if needed.
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
URL = (
"wss://production-sfo.browserless.io/stealth"
"?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN"
"&proxy=residential&proxyCountry=us"
"&solveCaptchas=true&timeout=300000"
)
with sync_playwright() as p:
browser = p.chromium.connect_over_cdp(URL)
# Reuse the default context's page so Browserless CDP events stay visible.
page = browser.contexts[0].pages[0]
page.goto("https://example.com/login")
page.fill("#email", "you@example.com")
page.fill("#password", "...")
page.click("button[type=submit]")
# Turnstile or DataDome may appear here. Browserless solves it in the
# background, which takes 15 to 60 seconds, so wait rather than retry.
page.wait_for_selector(".dashboard", timeout=120000)
# Branch on what the page actually returned.
rows = []
while True:
rows += page.locator(".row").all_inner_texts()
next_link = page.locator(".next-page:visible").first
if not next_link.count() or not next_link.is_visible() or not next_link.is_enabled():
break
next_link.click()
page.wait_for_load_state("networkidle")
print(len(rows))
browser.close()You can run them side by side
Split the work by shape: bulk reading on one side, stateful interaction on the other.
Send it to an extraction API
Content extraction from public pages, documentation, and blogs: page content you want as markdown for an index. One credit per page, no session to manage.
Send it to Browserless
Anything behind a login, anything with a CAPTCHA or bot protection, anything that runs longer than a few minutes, custom scrapers that branch mid-run, and anything AI agents need to keep their place in.
Security & compliance
Firecrawl alternative FAQs
Firecrawl alternative FAQs
Try it on the flow that keeps timing out
Start free with 1,000 units and no credit card. Point an existing Playwright or Puppeteer script at Browserless and run the whole journey in one session.