Browser Use vs Browserless
Browser Use rents stealth Chromium browsers by the hour and runs a hosted agent that drives them, with sessions of up to four hours. Browserless is a browser API for your own Puppeteer, Playwright or BrowserQL code, with Chrome, Firefox and WebKit, REST endpoints and a Docker image you can run yourself, on sessions of up to 60 minutes.
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.
Browserless
Browserless calls itself a cloud browser automation platform: managed headless browsers you connect to with one line of code.
You point existing Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium code at a Browserless WebSocket URL, or use BrowserQL, its GraphQL language with stealth and CAPTCHA solving, REST endpoints for screenshots, PDFs and scraping, and an MCP server. Sessions are short (2 to 60 minutes by plan), and only the browser profile can be kept between them. It is a browser product, not a general sandbox: you get a browser, not a shell or root on the machine, so this page compares where the two overlap, which is agents that browse.
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 | Browserless: 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 disk, which neither browser product gives you, so builds and tests fit boat. | 48th of 367, with limits $301 a month | 170th of 367, with limits $1,771 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 four-hour stop and Browserless's 60-minute cap; boat has no session cap on paid plans. | 63rd of 366, with limits $750 a month | 297th of 366, with limits $6,170 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 | 267th of 345, with limits $350 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 | 199th of 361, with limits $270 a month | 264th of 361, with limits $1,490 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 | 279th of 360, with limits $8,600 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. | 226th of 364, with limits $90 a month | 247th of 364, with limits $350 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 | 241st of 377, with limits $140 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A dev box has to keep its files and processes, and both products keep only a browser profile between sessions. | 212th of 368, with limits $25 a month | 336th of 368, with limits $350 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 on web pages only, while boat streams a 60fps Linux desktop where an agent can use any app, so boat ranks 6th against 83rd and 141st. | 83rd of 369, with limits $133 a month | 141st of 369, with limits $350 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 Both are built for this: Browser Use ranks 3rd with its hosted agent and stealth on by default, Browserless ranks 19th, and boat ranks 7th when the agent also needs a shell and files. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $140 a month | 19th cheapest of 367 $350 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 at 14th and Browserless at 47th; boat ranks 6th because each bot gets a whole machine with a disk that stays. | 14th cheapest of 346 $198 a month | 47th cheapest of 346 $478 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 Browser Use ranks 1st here, with residential proxies, random fingerprints and CAPTCHA solving included; Browserless ranks 20th, and boat, on datacenter IPs, ranks 71st. | Cheapest of 338 $2,950 a month | 20th of 338, with limits $17,150 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 | 247th of 360, with limits $350 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 | Browserless | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | Managed stealth browsers over CDP, plus a hosted browser agent you send tasks to | Managed headless browsers, plus BrowserQL, REST APIs and an MCP server | A full Linux VM per sandbox, with its own kernel, a desktop and Chromium inside |
| Browsers | Their own hardened Chromium fork | Chrome, Firefox and WebKit | Chromium on a Linux desktop, and anything else you install |
| How you drive it | Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP, or plain-words tasks to the hosted agent | Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium over WebSocket, BrowserQL, or one-call REST screenshots, PDFs and scraping | Any tool inside the VM, over SSH or the API |
| Hosted agent | Its own browser agent with a choice of models, a session queue and an events API | Agent Run API in beta, up to 15 minutes and 60 steps per turn | Claude Code, Codex and five other coding agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Session length | Agent browsers stop after 4 hours; idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes | 2 minutes on Free, 15 on Prototyping, 30 on Starter, 60 on Scale | 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 | Persisted sessions keep cookies, localStorage and cache for 1 to 90 days; a new browser process starts on reconnect | The whole disk is saved every minute and on stop; fork a running sandbox |
| Stealth and CAPTCHAs | Stealth on by default, fingerprints that change per session, automatic CAPTCHA solving (off in the EU) | BrowserQL stealth with fingerprint mitigations and CAPTCHA solving | Chromium on datacenter IPs; no fingerprint rotation or CAPTCHA solving |
| Proxies | Residential proxies in 195+ countries, on by default, or bring your own | Built-in residential and datacenter proxies; your own proxy on paid plans | None managed; you can run your own proxy client inside the VM |
| Browsers at once | 10 to 1,000, rising with a project's lifetime payments | 2 on Free; 10, 40 and 100 on the annual Prototyping, Starter and Scale plans | 300 at once fit in the table's user-sandbox scenario; bursts above 90 starts a minute are queued |
| Open source and self-hosting | The browser-use agent library is MIT and runs on your own machine | The core Docker image is SSPL-1.0 and runs on your own server; commercial use needs a license | Hosted only |
| Shell, code and Docker | No shell on the machine running the browser | No shell or SSH; browsers run in Docker containers that share the host kernel | Root, SSH, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Hosting your own ports | No way to serve your own ports | Fixed regional endpoints and short-lived live URLs; no ports to host on | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Keeping secrets from the agent | Secrets typed into the page by alias; the model never sees them, but the browser does | 1Password integration fills logins into the page without the value reaching your code | Credentials proxy: real keys never enter the sandbox, for model providers and any HTTPS API |
| Watching and taking over | Embeddable live view of the browser for review or takeover, plus a recording | Live URLs that hand a session to a person, and computer-use integrations | A full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, embeddable and recorded; computer use on any app |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Browser Use | Browserless | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Not published | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | No | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | No | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | No | 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 | Not published | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | No | No | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Not published | Not published | 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 | Yes | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes | No |
| BYOC | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | Yes | Yes | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | No | 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 Browserless sell browser time and do not publish the CPU or memory behind a session, and neither is 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 Browserless 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 | Browserless, 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 | $350 · Scale annual · 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 | $350 · Scale annual · 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 | $1,026 · Scale annual · 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 | $410 · Scale annual · 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 | $1,400 · Scale annual · 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 and on by default, direct traffic $0.20 per GB, and agent runs add model tokens plus a 20% fee.
Browserless: Browserless bills in units of up to 30 seconds of a connected browser, and a reconnect starts a new block. Plans include 20,000, 180,000 or 500,000 units a month, then $0.0020 to $0.0015 a unit; proxy traffic and CAPTCHA solves use the same units, and annual billing costs less and adds concurrency.
Browserless: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
No scenario in the table fits Browser Use or Browserless as written, because each asks for a general machine and both sell a browser session of a size they do not publish. Browser Use's four-hour stop and Browserless's 60-minute cap on Scale rule out the workday and always-on agents, and Browserless also keeps no disk. Browser Use concurrency rises with lifetime payments ($200 for 50 sessions, $25,000 for 1,000), while Browserless tops out at 100 at once on Scale annual, so 300 user sandboxes and 1,000 short jobs need Enterprise. boat fits every scenario except 1,000 short jobs at once, where starts above 90 a minute are queued.
| Scenario | Browser Use | Browserless | 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 want a hosted agent that does browser tasks for you, with stealth, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies on by default, sessions of up to four hours and up to 1,000 browsers at once.
- A browser agent you just send tasks to. For teams that want results, not scripts: send a task in plain words and the hosted agent does it, with your choice of model.
- Longer sessions and more browsers. For bigger jobs: agent browsers run up to four hours, and concurrency grows to 1,000 browsers as your spend grows.
- Stealth and proxies on by default. For sites with strong bot checks: hardened Chromium, per-session fingerprints and residential proxies in 195+ countries without extra setup.
Use Browserless when
you already have Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium code, want Chrome, Firefox or WebKit, one-call REST screenshots and PDFs, or a browser image you can run on your own servers.
- Your existing scripts, three engines. For teams with Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium code already: point it at a URL, and test on Chrome, Firefox or WebKit.
- One-call web APIs. For jobs that need no script: REST endpoints return screenshots, PDFs and scraped content, and BrowserQL handles pages that block bots.
- Run it on your own servers. For browsers that must stay inside your network: the Browserless Docker image is open source and self-hostable with a commercial license.
Where boat fits
Browser Use and Browserless both rent you a browser, not a computer. If what you are really running is agents that browse and then write code, run tools or serve an app, boat gives each one a full Linux VM with Chromium and a desktop inside. For browsing alone on sites that block bots, either of them is the better fit.
A whole machine around the browser
Neither Browser Use nor Browserless gives your agent a shell, Docker or a disk. To clone a repo or run a script on what it found, you run a second machine and move every file between the two.
No session cap, and the disk stays
Browser Use stops agent browsers after four hours and Browserless ends sessions after 60 minutes on Scale. Long jobs must be split, keeping only cookies and a small workspace or profile, while boat saves the whole disk every minute.
Coding agents driven from outside, keys kept out
Browser Use types secrets into the page, and Browserless's 1Password fill covers logins only, so API keys live in your code. boat drives Claude Code, Codex and others from outside, behind a credentials proxy for any HTTPS API.
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 has to keep working for hours or days. Compare it one to one: boat vs Browser Use and boat vs Browserless.
Questions people ask
Is Browser Use cheaper than Browserless?
In the table, yes, in all five scenarios: for example $178 against $1,026 for 50 agents in parallel, and $210 against $1,400 for 1,000 short jobs at once. Neither fits any scenario as a general machine, and both bill proxy traffic on top.
Which is faster, Browser Use or Browserless?
There is no way to tell from published numbers. Neither publishes the CPU or memory behind a browser session, and neither is in the CPU benchmark. boat scored 26.69 runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Browser Use or Browserless run Docker or a shell?
No. Both give you a browser, not a shell on the machine. You can run the Browserless Docker image on your own server, but that is your machine. Every boat sandbox has root, SSH, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
How long can a session run on each?
Browser Use agent browsers stop after four hours, and idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes. Browserless sessions last 2 minutes on Free up to 60 on Scale, with custom limits on Enterprise. boat has no session cap on paid plans.
Which is better at getting past bot checks?
Both have stealth, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies. Browser Use turns stealth and residential proxies on by default in 195+ countries, but solves no CAPTCHAs in its EU deployment; Browserless does it through BrowserQL. boat runs Chromium on datacenter IPs.
Can I use either one with boat?
Yes. The MIT browser-use library runs inside a boat sandbox, and an agent on boat can connect to a Browserless session over WebSocket. Protected browsing stays on the browser service, and code, files and tools stay on a VM that keeps its disk.
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