Browserbase

Browserbase is cloud-hosted headless browser infrastructure that gives AI agents fully managed Chromium instances with built-in stealth mode, CAPTCHA solving, residential proxies, and session recording — eliminating the need to self-host and maintain browser automation infrastructure at scale.

How It Works

Browserbase gives AI agents real browsers in the cloud. Instead of parsing static HTML or fighting with headless Chrome configs, your agent gets a fully rendered Chromium instance that clicks, types, scrolls, and navigates like a human would.

This matters because modern web apps render content with JavaScript. Simple HTTP requests miss half the page. Browserbase handles the JavaScript rendering, manages browser sessions, and adds stealth features so your agent doesn't get blocked by anti-bot systems.

How It Compares to Running Your Own Browsers

You could set up headless Chrome with Playwright or Puppeteer on your own servers. The upside: full control, no per-hour costs. The downside: you manage browser updates, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, fingerprint randomization, and scaling infrastructure yourself.

Browserbase abstracts all of that into an API. You connect via a standard Chrome DevTools Protocol endpoint, run your Playwright or Puppeteer scripts as usual, and Browserbase handles the rest. The trade-off is cost: you pay per browser-hour rather than per VM.

Pricing Overview

Browserbase offers a free Developer tier with 1 browser hour and 1 concurrent session for evaluation. The Startup plan starts at $39/month with 100 browser hours and higher concurrency limits. The Scale plan at $199/month provides significantly more capacity with advanced stealth, residential proxies, and CAPTCHA solving. Enterprise plans are custom-priced with SOC 2, HIPAA, and dedicated infrastructure.

Who Uses It

Browserbase is used by companies like Perplexity and Apify for high-volume browser automation. Teams building AI agents with frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, and the OpenAI Agents SDK use Browserbase as their default browser infrastructure layer.

The Stagehand SDK

Browserbase's open-source Stagehand SDK layers natural-language actions on top of Playwright. Instead of writing brittle CSS selectors, agents call functions like act, extract, and observe to interact with pages using LLM-driven reasoning. This makes agent code more resilient to UI changes.