Browserless Alternatives Compared: Browserbase vs Steel

Which Browserless Alternative Fits Your Workload?

The right browserless alternative depends on which half of Browserless you use. Running Puppeteer or Playwright at volume points to another hosted CDP endpoint such as Browserbase, an open-source server such as Steel, or your own container. Needing only rendered HTML points to a scraping API. Needing a person signed into a real account points away from all of them — that work belongs in an isolated browser profile.

Here is the field in one view, starting with the services that run browsers for you.

One category is missing from that table on purpose: work a person performs inside a logged-in account. None of the services above covers it, and it is where teams end up buying a second, unrelated tool. That category is a browser profile manager, and Send.win is the example used later in this article — Pro at $19/mo for 150 profiles, Team at $49/mo for 500.

The middle column decides most migrations. Be honest about whether your workload runs on its own or needs a person driving it, because no amount of endpoint compatibility fixes picking the wrong category.

Why Teams Start Looking for a Browserless Alternative

Most switches begin with a specific bill or a specific ceiling, not a missing feature. Browserless has a real strength: you keep your existing Puppeteer or Playwright code and change one connection string. What pushes people out is metering.

• Session ceilings by tier. Maximum session time is 2 minutes on Free, 15 on Prototyping, 30 on Starter and 60 on Scale. Any job with a login, a one-time code and a few page loads can hit the low end.
• Reconnects bill again. Reconnecting a dropped session counts as a new connection and charges a fresh unit, so retries multiply silently.
• Proxy traffic is charged in units. Residential costs 6 units per MB, datacenter 2 per MB, so heavy pages can outrun the browser time they consumed.
• Free concurrency is 2 browsers. Fine for prototyping, not enough to drain a queue.

The second trigger is workload drift. A pipeline that rendered invoices now has to hold a session open and call tools in a loop, and per-30-second billing no longer matches how the work behaves. If you are at that fork, Browserless vs Puppeteer Cloud walks through the service-selection side in more detail.

How Browserless Counts a Unit, and Why Your Bill Overran

One unit is 30 seconds of browser time on one connection. A five-minute session is 10 units. Two thousand five-minute sessions are 20,000 units, which costs $40 on Prototyping, $34 on Starter and $30 on Scale. The entry tier charges about a third more per extra 1,000 units than the top tier, so growing into overage on a small plan is the most expensive way to buy browser time.

Proxy traffic changes the arithmetic more than people expect. A five-minute session pushing 10 MB through a residential proxy adds 60 units, so the job costs 70 — seven times the session time alone. The same 10 MB over a datacenter proxy adds 20.

Unit prices and tier sizes change, so check the Browserless pricing page before you build a budget on any figure here. Proxy bandwidth carries compliance questions too; residential proxy rules and compliance is worth reading before you route production traffic through one.

The Headless Alternatives, Feature by Feature

Every option below runs browsers without a visible window, and each one is built for a different shape of job. Match the shape first, then the price.

Browserbase: managed CDP built for agents

Browserbase is hosted only. You get managed CDP sessions with recording and replay, plus a bundled Agent runtime, Search API and Fetch API. It bills by concurrency and browser hours rather than 30-second chunks: free covers 3 browsers, 1 browser hour and 15-minute sessions; Developer is $20/mo for 25 browsers and 100 hours, then $0.12 per extra hour; Startup is $99/mo for 100 browsers and 500 hours, then $0.10; an Enterprise tier covers 250+ browsers. Some managed features are off on Free and on from Developer up.

Its strength is the agent tooling in one bill. Its limit is that hour-based pricing only beats unit-based pricing when sessions are genuinely long, and you cannot self-host.

Steel: the open-source route

Steel is an Apache 2.0 browser API you can run yourself or buy hosted. Hobby is free at 100 browser hours a month; Starter is $29/mo for 290 hours, Developer $99/mo for 1,238 hours and Startups $499/mo for 9,980 hours. Self-hosting costs nothing beyond infrastructure. If you already run containers, Steel keeps a CDP-compatible API without a per-session fee — and hands you version bumps, memory growth and restarts.

Cloudflare Browser Rendering: cheap and narrow

Browser Rendering is a Puppeteer-compatible API that runs inside a Worker and bills as part of the Cloudflare platform, close to where the request is served. It suits rendering and extraction, not long-lived interactive sessions or jobs carrying heavy per-session state.

Hyperbrowser and BrowserCat: smaller clouds

Hyperbrowser is cloud-only and credit-based: 1,000 free credits with one concurrent browser, Startup at $30/mo and Scale at $100/mo, with MCP integration and fast starts aimed at agent workflows. BrowserCat serves headless Chromium on demand over an API for scraping and DOM extraction — a fit for short tasks rather than custom hosting.

ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee: scraping APIs, not browser APIs

Both take a URL and return HTML or structured data. There is no CDP endpoint, so nothing clicks, types or holds a session. ScraperAPI multiplies credits per request: 1 for a standard call, 10 for JavaScript rendering or a premium proxy, 25 for premium plus render, 75 for ultra-premium plus render, with fixed multipliers for marketplaces and search results. A 100,000-credit plan therefore buys anywhere from 100,000 requests to about 1,333.

Self-hosted Playwright and Selenium Grid

The official Playwright container behind a queue charges no per-session fee, but you own memory-leak restarts, crashed tabs and browser version currency. Selenium Grid remains the right answer for cross-browser tests that need real Firefox and Safari, and is heavier than high-volume headless Chrome needs.

What Each Option Costs

Figures below come from vendor pricing pages and published breakdowns as of October 2026. Browserless does not publish stable base prices for its paid tiers in its public breakdown, so those rows show unit allowances and overage rates rather than a monthly total — confirm the base price on the vendor page before you budget.

Two rows do not belong in the same comparison, and that is the point. Most of the table buys browser time that a process spends; the last two buy isolated profiles a person drives. A team that needs the second and buys the first usually ends up paying for both.

Pros and Cons, Honestly

Browserless — pros: one-string endpoint swap for existing Puppeteer and Playwright code, Chrome/WebKit/Firefox, REST endpoints for PDF, screenshot and downloads, BrowserQL for scripted flows, and a Docker image when you want out of the hosted service. Cons: 30-second metering punishes long authenticated sessions, residential traffic at 6 units per MB is the hidden line item, and session caps rise only with tier.

Browserbase — pros: managed CDP with recording and replay, an Agent runtime plus Search and Fetch APIs on one bill, and hour-based pricing for genuinely long sessions. Cons: no self-hosting at any tier, a 15-minute cap on Free, and a three-browser free tier too small for a real queue.

Steel — pros: Apache 2.0 licence, self-hosting for infrastructure cost only, and 9,980 browser hours at $499 on the top published tier. Cons: you own upgrades, memory growth and crashed-tab cleanup, and hosted overage is not published, so budget from your own measurements.

Cloudflare, Hyperbrowser, BrowserCat — pros: Puppeteer-compatible syntax inside a Worker, credit or on-demand billing, fast starts and usable free allowances. Cons: narrow session lifetimes, smaller ecosystems and cloud-only delivery.

ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee — pros: cheapest per page when all you need is HTML or structured data, with rendering and proxy rotation handled for you. Cons: multipliers can turn 100,000 credits into roughly 1,333 real requests, and no CDP endpoint means no session control.

Self-hosted Playwright or Selenium Grid — pros: no per-session fee, full control of the browser build, and Grid is the realistic route to real Firefox and Safari in a test matrix. Cons: restarts, dead tabs, patching and version drift become your job, and staff time usually costs more than the subscription it replaced.

Send.win — pros: each profile keeps its own cookies, storage, sessions and consistent fingerprint, residential proxies are included with timezone, locale, WebRTC and geolocation following the exit IP, and sharing a profile with a paid teammate opens it already signed in. Cons: it is strictly human-driven — every session is opened and used by a person, so it cannot stand in for a pipeline — and the desktop app has no free trial.

Migrating Without a Rewrite: The Endpoint Swap

Every hosted CDP provider here accepts a WebSocket endpoint, which is why migration is usually a configuration change rather than a refactor. Point Playwright at the new URL, run the same job, compare the recording.

import os
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

# Any hosted CDP endpoint: wss://...?token=...
# Switching providers means changing this one value.
ENDPOINT = os.environ["BROWSER_WS_ENDPOINT"]

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.connect_over_cdp(ENDPOINT)
    context = browser.new_context()
    page = context.new_page()
    page.goto("https://example.com", wait_until="domcontentloaded")
    print(page.title())
    context.close()
    browser.close()

Each connect_over_cdp call opens a connection, and on Browserless that is where the unit clock starts. If you are still wiring up the client side, calling a Browserless API from Python covers the Node and Python patterns, including error handling for dropped sessions.

Which Should You Pick?

Match the workload, then confirm the price on the vendor page the week you buy. Every provider in this list changes its tiers.

There is a sixth case the table cannot hold: a person who has to sign into a client account and get work done — review an ad account, check a storefront listing, post as a brand profile, reproduce a support ticket as a specific user in a specific region. Send.win sits on that side of the fence, and the next section covers what it does and where its limits are.

Two rules cut most of the confusion. Count proxy bandwidth in the same breath as browser time, because residential traffic is metered separately almost everywhere. And keep any workload that needs a human decision out of an automated pipeline — a person signing into a client account and a process fetching a page are different products, and forcing one into the other is where budgets break.

Whatever you choose, use it only on sites and accounts you own or are authorised to manage, and follow each platform’s terms. Scraping against a site’s terms, driving accounts a platform does not permit, or working around a verification step is out of bounds regardless of the tool.

The Workload No Automated Browser Covers

Agencies, marketplace sellers and support teams keep arriving at the same problem: the work is not a pipeline. Someone has to sign into a client’s ad account, check a storefront listing, post from a brand profile, or reproduce a bug as a user in another region. A metered browser service handles that badly because the session sits idle most of the time, and handing a password to a teammate or freelancer is worse.

Send.win is built for that half of the job, for accounts you own or are authorised to manage. Each browser profile holds its own cookies, storage, sessions and fingerprint settings, so two client accounts never share one browser identity, and a profile opens on a proxy whose exit IP drives timezone, locale, WebRTC and geolocation. The desktop app runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and keeps local profiles on your machine; the cloud browser runs profiles on Send.win’s EU server in Helsinki from any device, with nothing to install. Sharing a profile with a paid teammate opens it already signed in, so no password changes hands. What a cloud browser server does explains the split in more detail.

Be clear about the boundary: Send.win is a human-driven tool. Every session in it is opened and used by a person, there is no developer interface to connect to on any plan, and nothing in it is designed to run on its own. It covers the human side of the workflow, not the pipeline.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best browserless alternative for scraping?

It depends on whether you need a browser or just the HTML. For jobs that must click, type and hold state, Browserless itself is still the lowest-friction option because existing Puppeteer and Playwright code runs unchanged against a new endpoint. For plain page fetches with rendering, ScraperAPI or ScrapingBee cost less per page.

Is there an open-source Browserless replacement I can self-host?

Yes. Steel is Apache 2.0 and free to self-host, and Browserless publishes its own Docker image. Self-hosting removes per-session fees but adds memory-leak restarts, crashed-tab cleanup and browser version maintenance. A managed host quotes about €9/month per server for a self-managed instance with no per-unit fees.

How much does Browserbase cost compared to Browserless?

Browserbase bills by concurrency and browser hours: free for 3 browsers and 1 hour, $20/mo for 25 browsers and 100 hours with $0.12 per extra hour, $99/mo for 100 browsers and 500 hours with $0.10. Browserless bills in 30-second units: 1,000 free, then tiers of 20,000, 180,000 and 500,000 units with overage between $2.00 and $1.50 per 1,000. Compare cost per finished job, not per plan.

Can I run headless Chrome on Cloudflare?

Yes, through Browser Rendering, a Puppeteer-compatible API inside a Worker that bills as part of the Cloudflare platform. It works well for rendering pages and extracting data near the request origin. It is a poor fit for long-lived interactive sessions or heavy per-session state.

What is the difference between a scraping API and a browser API?

A scraping API takes a URL and returns HTML or structured data with no CDP endpoint, so you cannot drive a session. A browser API gives you a browser you control: navigate, click, type, read state. The first is cheaper per request; the second is the only option when the job needs interaction or a logged-in session.

How does Browserless count a unit, and why did my bill overrun?

One unit is 30 seconds of browser time on one connection, and a reconnect counts as a new connection with a fresh unit. Proxy traffic is charged in the same currency: 6 units per MB residential, 2 per MB datacenter. A five-minute job with 10 MB of residential traffic costs 70 units, so bandwidth can dominate a bill that looks small on session time alone.

Which alternative works best for AI agents?

Browserbase is the most complete option, bundling managed CDP sessions with an Agent runtime, Search API, Fetch API and replay in one bill. Hyperbrowser targets the same audience with credit-based pricing, a smaller free tier and fast starts. Both are cloud-only, so test on the free tiers before you commit.

Do I need a remote browser or just rendered HTML?

If you never interact with the page and only need its content, rendered HTML from a scraping API is the cheaper answer. If the job involves logging in, filling a form, waiting on client-side state or reading cookies, you need a browser you control — hosted, self-hosted, or, when a person is doing the work, an isolated profile they drive themselves.

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