Browser Use vs Anchor Browser
Both rent you a managed Chromium in their cloud that your agent drives over CDP or a hosted agent. Browser Use costs less per browser-hour and turns stealth on for everyone, while Anchor Browser keeps logins with MFA, lets sessions run longer and offers more regions.
The companies and products
Browser Use
Browser Use makes the popular open-source browser-agent library and runs Browser Use Cloud, a service of managed browsers and a hosted agent that uses them.
Browser Use Cloud is a different kind of product from boat: you get a hardened Chromium browser in their cloud that you drive over CDP with Playwright or Puppeteer, or a hosted agent that you send tasks to through an API. It comes with stealth fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies, and you pay per browser-hour. It is built for teams that need many browsers that get past anti-bot checks, not a machine to run their own code on.
Anchor Browser
Anchor Browser is cloud browser infrastructure for AI agents: managed Chromium sessions you control over CDP or a REST API, plus a hosted browser agent.
Anchor Browser is a different kind of product from boat. Each session is a headful Chromium in its own VM that is erased when the session ends, and you drive it with Playwright or Puppeteer, with mouse and keyboard calls, or by sending a task in plain words to its hosted agent. It adds managed logins with MFA, residential proxies, stealth and CAPTCHA solving, and its own docs tell you to run your agent's code in a separate sandbox and connect to the browser over CDP.
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “3rd cheapest of 367” means 2 of the other 366 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | Browser Use: price rank | Anchor Browser: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A software factory needs a shell, Docker and a place to build and test, which neither browser service gives you; boat ranks 3rd here. | 48th of 367, with limits $301 a month | 180th of 367, with limits $2,000 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that runs all month hits Browser Use's 4-hour stop and Anchor's erased session VM; boat ranks 5th because its disk is kept. | 63rd of 366, with limits $750 a month | 71st of 366, with limits $1,845 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month | 216th of 345, with limits $71 a month | 325th of 345, with limits $2,171 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month 300 sandboxes for your users is more than Anchor's Growth plan allows at once (200 browsers), and on both each one is a browser, not a machine. | 199th of 361, with limits $270 a month | 283rd of 361, with limits $2,000 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 227th of 360, with limits $1,010 a month | 298th of 360, with limits $12,510 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month Agent evals that mix browsing with running code fit better on a full machine you can fork for every run; boat ranks 10th, Browser Use 226th. | 226th of 364, with limits $90 a month | 357th of 364, with limits $2,000 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month | 219th of 377, with limits $64 a month | 284th of 377, with limits $500 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 212th of 368, with limits $25 a month | 222nd of 368, with limits $42 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Both act inside a browser only; computer-use agents that need other apps fit boat better, which ranks 6th with a full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps. | 83rd of 369, with limits $133 a month | 173rd of 369, with limits $500 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month This is home ground for both: Browser Use ranks 3rd and Anchor Browser ranks 28th, and boat ranks 7th when the agent also needs a shell, files or code next to the browser. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $140 a month | 28th cheapest of 367 $560 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month At startup scale both fit, with Browser Use ranking 14th and Anchor Browser 50th, while boat ranks 6th by giving each bot a whole machine whose disk keeps its files. | 14th cheapest of 346 $198 a month | 50th cheapest of 346 $500 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month For mass scraping of sites with strong bot checks, Browser Use ranks 1st with stealth on by default, Anchor Browser ranks 5th, and boat, on datacenter IPs, is not built for it. | Cheapest of 338 $2,950 a month | 5th of 338, with limits $6,175 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 50th of 360, with limits $68 a month | 334th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Browser Use | Anchor Browser | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A managed hardened Chromium over CDP, or a hosted agent you send tasks to | A managed headful Chromium in its own VM, over CDP or Anchor's API, or a hosted agent | A full Linux VM with its own kernel and root, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts, with Chromium inside |
| Shell, code and Docker | No shell on the machine running the browser | No shell; from Growth you can run TypeScript snippets against the page | SSH, any language, Docker, systemd and nested virtualization (/dev/kvm) |
| Session length | Agent browsers stop after 4 hours; idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes | 180 minutes by default, with no upper limit if you raise it; ends after 5 idle minutes by default | No cap on paid plans; you set the time to live |
| State between sessions | Browser profiles keep cookies and logins; workspaces sync up to 950 MiB of files | The VM is erased; profiles keep cookies and cache, and up to 10 volumes keep files | The whole disk is saved every minute and on stop; fork a running sandbox |
| Desktop and live view | Embeddable live view of the browser for review or takeover, plus a recording | Embeddable live view of the browser, with mouse, keyboard and screenshot calls | A full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, or Chromium alone; embed it, record it |
| Stealth and CAPTCHAs | Stealth on by default, fingerprints that change per session, CAPTCHA solving (off in the EU) | CAPTCHA solving from Starter, full stealth on Growth, unique fingerprints on Enterprise | Chromium on datacenter IPs; no fingerprint rotation or CAPTCHA solving |
| Proxies | Residential proxies in 195+ countries, on by default, $5 per GB, or bring your own | Residential proxies with country and city targeting and sticky IPs, $8 per GB, or bring your own | None managed; you can run your own proxy client inside the VM |
| Logging in to sites | Browser profiles carry cookies and logins between runs | Managed identities with MFA keep logins across sessions, from Starter | Your agent logs in itself; boat switches AI credentials to another account when credits run out |
| Hosted agents | Their own hosted browser agent with a choice of models and an events API | Hosted browser agents (browser-use, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic computer use) with human-in-the-loop and webhooks | Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Browsers at once | 10 to 1,000, rising with lifetime payments ($25,000 paid for 1,000) | 5, 25, 50, 200 and 500+ by plan (Free, Starter, Team, Growth, Enterprise) | 50 agents fit on 3 seats and 300 user sandboxes on 2; very large bursts of starts are queued |
| Keeping secrets from the agent | Secrets typed into the page by alias; the model never sees them, but the browser does | Secret values are hidden from the model and typed into the page | Credentials proxy: real keys never enter the sandbox, for any HTTPS API |
| Hosting | No way to serve your own ports | No ports of your own; only the CDP socket and the live view URL | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Regions | US, plus an EU deployment in Frankfurt with a smaller feature set | US by default; EU, Asia and Australia on Growth; your own cloud or on-premise on Enterprise | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
| Open source | The browser-use agent library is MIT and runs on your own machine | No | No |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Browser Use | Anchor Browser | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | No | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | No | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | No | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | No | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | No | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | No | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Not published | No | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | No | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Not published | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes | No |
| BYOC | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | Yes | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | No | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Yes | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either. Browser Use and Anchor Browser sell browser-hours, do not publish the CPU or memory behind each browser, and are not in the CPU benchmark. boat scored 26.69 runs per second on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js test at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Browser Use and Anchor Browser have no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | Browser Use, a month | Anchor Browser, a month | boat, a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $7 · Pay as you go · with limits | $7 · Free · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $25 · Pay as you go · with limits | $42 · Free · with limits | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $178 · Spend tier 50 · with limits | $500 · Team · with limits | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $150 · Spend tier 500 · with limits | $2,000 · Growth · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $210 · Spend tier 1000 · with limits | $2,510 · Growth · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Browser Use: Browser Use bills $0.02 per browser-hour, rounded up to whole minutes, from prepaid credits that never expire. Residential proxy traffic is $5 per GB (on by default) or $0.20 per GB direct, and agent runs add model tokens plus a 20% fee.
Anchor Browser: Anchor bills $0.05 per browser-hour plus $0.01 for each browser created, from plan fees that become credits (Starter $50, Team $500, Growth $2,000). Proxy traffic is $8 per GB, or $0.20 per GB direct, and AI tasks are priced per step.
Anchor Browser: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit. You pay per second while a sandbox runs, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
No scenario in the table fits either one as written, because each asks for a general machine and both sell a browser session with no shell, of a size they do not publish. Browser Use's 4-hour stop rules out the workday and always-on agents, and its concurrency grows with lifetime payments, not a monthly fee. Anchor caps browsers at once by plan (200 on Growth), so 300 sandboxes for your users and 1,000 short jobs at once go past Growth into Enterprise. boat fits every scenario except 1,000 short jobs at once, where its $2,000 plan queues the starts.
| Scenario | Browser Use | Anchor Browser | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays |
|
| None that bite |
| One agent that never stops |
|
| None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel |
|
| None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users |
|
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Browser Use when
you need lots of short browser tasks on sites with strong bot checks, at the lowest rate per browser-hour, with stealth and proxies on from the start.
- Stealth for everyone. For scraping sites with strong bot checks on any budget: stealth, changing fingerprints and residential proxies are on by default.
- Lower rate per browser-hour. For many short browser tasks: $0.02 per browser-hour against Anchor's $0.05 plus $0.01 per browser, and cheaper proxy traffic.
- Open-source agent library. For teams that want to run the same agent locally: the browser-use library is MIT, with about 118k GitHub stars.
Use Anchor Browser when
your agents need to stay logged in to web apps with MFA, run browser sessions for hours, or work in regions beyond the US and EU.
- Managed logins with MFA. For agents that work inside web apps with no API: Anchor keeps identities logged in across sessions, MFA included.
- Longer sessions. For browser jobs that run for hours: sessions default to 180 minutes and you can raise that with no upper limit.
- More regions, or your own cloud. For teams that need browsers near users: EU, Asia and Australia on Growth, and your own cloud or on-premise on Enterprise.
Where boat fits
If what you are really running is an agent that browses and then does work with what it found, both Browser Use and Anchor Browser leave the rest of the job to a second machine. boat gives the agent one whole Linux VM with Chromium, a desktop, a shell and Docker, and keeps its disk. For pure stealth scraping at scale, stay with Browser Use or Anchor.
The browser and the code on one machine
Neither service gives you a shell, so downloads, scripts and builds run somewhere else you manage, and Anchor's own docs say to pair it with a separate sandbox. On boat the agent browses, runs code and serves the result in one VM.
Work that is kept, not wiped
Browser Use agent browsers stop after 4 hours, and each Anchor session VM is erased when it ends, so only cookies and a few files carry over. boat saves the whole disk every minute, a stopped sandbox costs nothing, and you can fork a running one.
A real desktop and keys kept out
Both act only inside a browser and type secrets into the page, where the browser can read them. boat streams a full desktop at 60fps for apps beyond the browser, and its credentials proxy keeps real API keys outside the sandbox.
Use boat when your agent does more than browse: it needs a shell, files, Docker, a desktop or a server next to the browser, and it has to keep its work between runs. Compare it one to one: boat vs Browser Use and boat vs Anchor Browser.
Questions people ask
Is Browser Use cheaper than Anchor Browser?
Usually. Browser Use bills $0.02 per browser-hour and Anchor $0.05 plus $0.01 per browser, so 50 agents in parallel come to $178 on Browser Use against $500 on Anchor. Both bill proxy traffic and AI steps on top, and Browser Use's proxy is cheaper per GB.
Which is faster, Browser Use or Anchor Browser?
Neither publishes the CPU or memory behind a browser, and neither is in the CPU benchmark, so there is no fair speed comparison. boat scored 26.69 runs per second on the Node.js test at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Browser Use or Anchor Browser run Docker?
No. Both give you a browser with no shell on the machine underneath; Anchor's Growth plan only runs TypeScript snippets against the page. boat gives you a full Linux VM with root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
How long can a session run on each?
Browser Use agent browsers stop after 4 hours. Anchor sessions default to 180 minutes and 5 idle minutes, and you can raise the maximum with no upper limit, but the VM is erased when the session ends. A boat sandbox has no session cap on paid plans and keeps its disk.
Can I use the browser-use agent on Anchor Browser?
Yes. Anchor lists browser-use among its hosted agents, next to OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic computer use. The browser-use library is MIT, so you can also run it yourself on your own machine or a boat sandbox.
Which is better at getting past bot checks?
Both are built for it. Browser Use turns stealth, changing fingerprints and residential proxies on for every account, while Anchor gates full stealth to Growth and unique fingerprints to Enterprise but adds city targeting and sticky IPs. boat runs Chromium on datacenter IPs.
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