Browserbase Alternatives for AI Agents: What Actually Differs (2026)

The short answer: the hosted browsers for agents (Browserbase, Anchor, Steel, Hyperbrowser, Browserless and Scrappy) all run Chrome in the cloud with a live view, saved logins, recording and an MCP server. What separates them is how they charge for residential proxy traffic, whether a saved login keeps one fixed IP, and what a person can do when the agent gets stuck. Pick on those three, not on the feature list, because the feature lists are nearly identical.

We sell one of these, so read this with that in mind. Every competitor figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page and docs on 1 October 2026. Where we say a vendor does not have something, we mean we did not find it in their public docs on that date, not that they cannot do it. If a figure here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.

The feature lists will not help you choose

We went through each vendor's docs for the features buyers ask about. Every one of the six documents:

• saved logins across sessions
• a live view a person can take over
• session recording
• an MCP server
• support for Claude's tools
• automatic CAPTCHA solving (the standard set: reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Turnstile and so on)

They also share the same two gaps. None of them can solve a PerimeterX press-and-hold challenge automatically, and none of them can make Google's "this browser may not be secure" page go away, because that page is account risk scoring rather than a puzzle. A person gets past both. So the question to ask about any of these vendors is how easily that person can get into the session.

Difference 1: how residential traffic is billed

This is the difference that moves the bill. Datacenter IP ranges are the first thing a bot check looks at, so signed-in or protected sites usually need a residential connection. Most vendors sell that traffic per gigabyte on top of browser time:

• Anchor (Starter, $50/month): $0.09 per browser hour, $8 per GB of residential traffic
• Steel (Launch, no monthly fee): $0.10 per hour, $10 per GB
• Hyperbrowser (Startup, $30/month): $0.10 per hour, $10 per GB
• Browserbase (Developer, $20/month): $0.12 per hour, $12 per GB
• Browserless (Prototyping, $25/month): $0.24 per hour, $12 per GB. It bills 30-second units, so we converted to an hour.
• Scrappy (no monthly fee): 5 credits to start a session, then 1 per minute, so 65 credits for an hour with the residential exit included. That is $1.17 an hour on the $9 pack, $0.94 on the $29 pack and $0.86 on the $79 pack.

Our bare hour is the most expensive on that list. If your agent does short, anonymous work and moves little residential traffic, any of the others will cost you less, and you should use one.

The comparison turns on traffic. Signed-in browsing on our own machines averaged about 144 MB an hour over a week of real sessions. At that rate, the all-in hour works out to:

• Anchor: about $1.24
• Steel and Hyperbrowser: about $1.54
• Browserbase: about $1.85
• Browserless: about $1.97
• Scrappy: $0.86 to $1.17, depending on the pack

Against Browserbase, our $79-pack hour is cheaper once a session moves more than about 61 MB of residential traffic an hour. Against Anchor the crossover is about 96 MB. Measure your own sessions before trusting either number: a page heavy with video or images moves far more, and a text dashboard far less.

We can include the traffic because of what we buy, not as a loss leader. Almost all of our sessions run on static residential addresses that we rent per IP per month with unmetered bandwidth, so a gigabyte costs us nothing extra. Vendors that resell metered rotating bandwidth pay per gigabyte, and they bill you the same way. How the residential exit works covers this in more detail.

Difference 2: does a saved login keep its IP?

Every vendor saves cookies. The question that decides whether those cookies keep working is where the next session comes from.

A session cookie issued to one IP and then replayed from a different datacenter address in a different timezone looks to the site like a stolen session. This was the most common reason logins we saved got challenged, before we pinned them. In the docs we read on 1 October:

• A fixed IP per saved login: documented by Scrappy, Steel, Hyperbrowser and Anchor
• Not found: Browserbase and Browserless

On Scrappy the pin is automatic. When you capture a login, we record the exit IP the session used, and every later session on that login goes out through the same address, with the browser's timezone set to match it. The login walkthrough shows that flow in code.

Difference 3: what the person can do when the agent is stuck

All six vendors have a live view. They differ in two places:

• Takeover from a phone: we found it only at Scrappy. In our viewer, one finger is the mouse, two fingers pan and zoom, and a keyboard button types into the page. This matters because the person holding the two-factor code is usually away from their desk.
• Approval before a risky step (holding a click or a form submit until a person says yes): documented by Scrappy and Anchor.

The human handoff walkthrough has the pattern in code.

When another vendor is the better pick

• You want to run the browser on your own servers. Steel publishes an open-source browser API you can host yourself, and Browserless offers self-hosting. We do not.
• Your sessions are short, anonymous and light on traffic. Rendering, screenshots, PDFs, public pages: a bare hour elsewhere is several times cheaper than ours.
• Your agents sit behind corporate SSO or a VPN. That is where Anchor puts its emphasis. Compare their support directly.
• You are already deep in one vendor's SDK or agent framework. Switching costs more than the price difference.

Two names this list leaves out

Assistants also name Browser Use and Kernel in answers to this question. We have not priced either against the same plan-and-traffic model yet, so we leave them out rather than guess. Browser Use is primarily an open-source agent framework that also sells a hosted browser. If you are comparing it, separate the agent (which model drives the clicks) from the browser it drives (where the session runs and which IP it uses). This post compares the second.

What to test before you commit

The fastest way to choose is to run your own hardest site on two vendors for an afternoon:

1. Sign in once by hand in the live view, and save the login.
2. Run the job ten times over a day from that saved login. Count the challenges and forced sign-outs.
3. Read the bill, including the proxy line.
4. Open the live view from your phone and try to finish a sign-in there.

On Scrappy, a new account gets 100 free credits, enough for that test. Copy-paste versions of the calls are in our examples repo, starting with 01-first-session.sh.

Side by side, one vendor at a time

• Scrappy vs Browserbase
• Scrappy vs Anchor
• Scrappy vs Steel
• Scrappy vs Hyperbrowser
• Scrappy vs Browserless
• Every vendor in one table