A browser agent is only as good as the infrastructure underneath it. That infrastructure has to be fast, affordable, and, most importantly, stealthy, as more and more websites tighten their access controls.
Browser Use and Browserbase are two of the leading options for running agents at scale. Let's look at their main use cases and compare their pricing, stealth, performance, and developer experience.
TL;DR
Choose Browser Use if you need affordable, stealthy browser infrastructure or want a hosted agent rather than just a browser. Browser Use also offers pay-as-you-go pricing with no subscription required. Choose Browserbase if you need direct Selenium support, prefer its developer tooling, or plan to use Stagehand.
| Compare | Browser Use | Browserbase |
|---|---|---|
| Main use | AI agent that drives a browser: open-source agent library + hosted agent + cheap stealth browsers | Headless browser infra for your own code: Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium sessions, plus Stagehand and Search/Fetch/Extract APIs |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Subscription + usage |
| Free tier | One-time $1 credit for eligible Google, GitHub, or Microsoft signups | Yes (includes 1 browser hour, 3 concurrent browsers, 3 agent runs) |
| Browser hour | $0.02/h | $0.10-0.12/h (overage) |
| Concurrency | Based on amount spent (starts at 10) | Based on subscription tier (starts at 3/free, 25/paid) |
| Performance | 386 ms | 662 ms |
| Stealth | 81% / 84.8% success | 42% / 70.3% success |
| Proxy | Custom + managed at $5/GB | Custom + managed at $10-12/GB (overage) |
| Compliance | SOC 2, HIPAA (Enterprise), DPA, zero data retention (Enterprise) | SOC 2, HIPAA (BAA) & DPA (Scale plan), SSO (Scale plan) |
∗ Performance is the BrowserArena session lifecycle (sum of step medians), measured October 26, 2026. BrowserArena tested Browserbase in us-west-2 from a us-east-1 runner; Browser Use in us-east-1.
∗ Stealth success is based on BU Stealth Bench and BrowserBench benchmarks. Browserbase was tested on Basic Stealth.
What is Browser Use?
Browser Use started in 2024 as an open-source library for AI-powered browser automation. The library lets you describe a task in natural language and have an AI agent perform it in the browser.
It later expanded into a cloud platform and currently offers two commercial products:
- Browser Use Agents -- a hosted version of the open-source library that supports custom models. Simply describe a task in a sentence, and an AI agent performs it.
- Browser Use Infrastructure -- affordable, stealthy, CDP-compatible browser infrastructure for AI agents and web scrapers. It powers Browser Use Agents.
You can use the hosted agent to handle a task end to end, or connect your own automation code to the browser infrastructure through tools like Playwright or Puppeteer.
What is Browserbase?
Browserbase started in 2024 as a browser infrastructure platform for AI agents. Later that year, they released Stagehand, an open-source framework for AI-powered browser automation.
Browserbase's main focus is headless browser infrastructure for your own code (e.g. Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium), along with specialized API endpoints (Search/Fetch/Extract). The platform also provides extensive developer tooling.
With Stagehand, you can combine explicit browser control with AI-powered steps in the same workflow. This lets you use code for predictable interactions and AI for steps that need more flexibility.
Browserbase and Browser Use Infrastructure are the browser layer; Stagehand and Browser Use Agents are the AI layer on top.
Comparison
Let's compare the two browser infrastructure providers across a few key areas.
Pricing
Browser Use follows a pay-as-you-go model and doesn't require a subscription. A browser hour costs $0.02, while a GB of residential proxy data costs $5. Credits never expire.
Browserbase, by contrast, offers tiered monthly plans ($0, $20, $99, custom) that include a fixed allowance of browser hours, proxy data, and API requests. Overage is charged at $0.10-0.12 per browser hour and $10-12 per GB of proxy data.
The allowances narrow the pricing gap, but don't close it. At scale, Browser Use is about 5x cheaper per browser hour and about 2x cheaper per GB of proxy data. That said, some teams might find the included API requests in Browserbase's plans useful.
Stealth
On paper, both providers' stealth feature sets look similar. Both can automatically solve CAPTCHAs, run residential proxies, and manage fingerprints. In practice, though, things are a bit different.
In BU stealth benchmark, Browserbase (Basic Stealth) scored 42%, versus 81% for Browser Use. The gap held across repeated runs and multiple anti-bot vendors, including Cloudflare, PerimeterX, and Datadome. A similar result appeared in our run of BrowserBench, where Browserbase scored 70.3%, while Browser Use scored 84.8%.
Browserbase has two stealth modes: Basic and Advanced. Basic automatically detects and solves CAPTCHAs and generates realistic browser fingerprints, while Advanced uses a custom Chromium build. As of now, Advanced Stealth is only available on the Scale plan.
With Browser Use, stealth isn't tiered. Every browser runs on a custom Chromium build with real fingerprints. No add-ons or sales calls required.
Performance & Limits
To compare performance, we'll use the results from The Browser Arena, an open-source browser benchmark built by Notte. For each vendor, the benchmark creates a cloud browser session through the vendor's API, connects Playwright over CDP, loads a website, and releases the session. It times each step, takes each step's median over 200 sequential runs (after 20 warm-ups), and sums those medians for the total.
On its October 26, 2026 run, the results are:
| Compare | Browser Use | Browserbase |
|---|---|---|
| Create session | 172 ms | 138 ms |
| Connect (CDP) | 111 ms | 222 ms |
| Navigate | 70 ms | 180 ms |
| Release | 33 ms | 122 ms |
| Total | 386 ms | 662 ms |
Browserbase creates a session faster (138 vs 172 ms). The other steps include network round trips: BrowserArena tested Browserbase in us-west-2 from a us-east-1 runner, and Browser Use in us-east-1.
Browserbase has the edge on session length. Paid plans allow sessions of up to 6 hours (15 minutes on Free), while Browser Use caps sessions at 4 hours.
Finally, let's talk about the browser concurrency limit. Browser Use ties the limit to your lifetime spend, while Browserbase bases it on your subscription tier:
| Browser Use (lifetime spend) | Concurrent browsers | Browserbase (plan) | Concurrent browsers |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0 | 10 | Free | 3 |
| $100 | 50 | Developer | 25 |
| $1,000 | 250 | Startup | 100 |
| $5,000 | 500 | Scale | 250+ |
| $25,000 | 1,000 |
In practice, Browser Use gives you more concurrency for free and scales it with usage, while Browserbase lets you jump to a higher limit right away by subscribing.
Developer Experience
Browser Use and Browserbase both provide a solid developer experience. Browserbase has a longer track record, while Browser Use is evolving quickly and adding new features.
Both provide Python and JavaScript/TypeScript SDKs, along with REST APIs. Both also allow direct browser control via the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). This gives them out-of-the-box support for Playwright and Puppeteer. Browserbase offers a direct Selenium connection, while Browser Use Cloud does not.
Moreover, Browserbase includes a session inspector and more mature session-replay tooling.
For AI automation, these tools emphasize different workflows. Browser Use Agents lets you give an agent a goal and retrieve the result, while Browserbase's Stagehand mixes explicit browser control with AI primitives.
Browserbase also offers specialized API endpoints (such as Search, Fetch, and Extract) that let you search the web and retrieve page content without launching a full browser session.
Conclusion
If you're running high-volume sessions against sites with active bot detection, the cost and stealth gap compounds fast and Browser Use is the cheaper bet. Browserbase may be a better fit if you need direct Selenium support, prefer its developer tooling, or plan to use Stagehand.
Curious how Browser Use compares to other providers? Check out:
