Browser Use vs Hyperbrowser
Browser Use rents stealth cloud browsers and a hosted agent that drives them, at $0.02 per browser-hour with residential proxies on by default. Hyperbrowser sells cloud browsers too, at $0.10 per browser-hour, and adds Firecracker sandboxes for code and web data APIs on the same credit balance.
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.
Hyperbrowser
Hyperbrowser calls itself the AI agents' gateway to the internet: cloud browsers, sandboxes, web data APIs and browser agents behind one API and one credit balance.
Its main product is a cloud Chrome session you drive with Playwright or Puppeteer, with stealth mode, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, saved profiles and recordings. Next to it Hyperbrowser sells Sandboxes, Firecracker VMs on Ubuntu 24.04 that live up to 24 hours, with memory snapshots, volumes and outbound rules, plus Fetch, Scrape and Search APIs and hosted browser agents. It is a browser and web data platform more than a general sandbox, so this page compares where it overlaps with boat: agents that browse, and agents that run code.
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 | Hyperbrowser: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Browser Use gives no shell, and Hyperbrowser's sandboxes do not document Docker and lose their disk on stop, so a software factory fits boat better. | 48th of 367, with limits $301 a month | 136th of 367, with limits $1,206 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 agent browser cap and Hyperbrowser's 24-hour sandbox lifetime; boat has no session cap on paid plans. | 63rd of 366, with limits $750 a month | 255th of 366, with limits $3,650 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 Hyperbrowser's memory snapshots start new sandboxes from a warm state, which suits short code runs that Browser Use cannot do at all. | 216th of 345, with limits $71 a month | 244th of 345, with limits $246 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 | 245th of 361, with limits $1,029 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 | 262nd of 360, with limits $4,972 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 | 226th of 364, with limits $90 a month | 253rd of 364, with limits $400 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 | 238th of 377, with limits $120 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 | 240th of 368, with limits $73 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 run computer-use agents inside a browser only; boat streams a 60fps Linux desktop where the agent can use any app. | 83rd of 369, with limits $133 a month | 144th of 369, with limits $360 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 and Hyperbrowser 20th, mostly because a Browser Use browser-hour costs a fifth as much, and boat fits too when the agent also needs a shell. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $140 a month | 20th cheapest of 367 $360 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, and Hyperbrowser's per-page Fetch and Scrape APIs can skip the browser; boat ranks 6th by giving each bot a whole machine with a disk that stays. | 14th cheapest of 346 $198 a month | 32nd cheapest of 346 $366 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 for undetectable mass scraping with stealth and residential proxies on by default; Hyperbrowser ranks 11th, with its strongest stealth and own proxies kept for Enterprise. | Cheapest of 338 $2,950 a month | 11th of 338, with limits $9,750 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 Red-team agents need their own tools and a shell; Hyperbrowser has sandboxes for that, Browser Use has only the browser, and boat gives each one a full VM. | 50th of 360, with limits $68 a month | 33rd of 360, with limits $356 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 | Hyperbrowser | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | Managed stealth Chromium over CDP, plus a hosted browser agent you send tasks to | Cloud Chrome sessions first, plus Firecracker sandboxes and fetch, scrape and search APIs | A full Linux VM per sandbox, with a desktop and Chromium inside |
| Browser price | $0.02 per browser-hour, rounded up to whole minutes, from prepaid credits that never expire | $0.10 per browser-hour from one credit balance; plan credits reset each month | The whole VM billed per second from plan credit; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Session length | Agent browsers stop after 4 hours; idle ones are cleaned up after about 20 minutes | Browsers up to 12 hours; sandboxes up to 24 hours from VM start | No cap on paid plans; you set the time to live |
| Stealth and CAPTCHAs | Hardened Chromium fork, random fingerprints per session and CAPTCHA solving, on by default (CAPTCHAs off in the EU) | Stealth mode and CAPTCHA solving on paid plans; ultra stealth on Enterprise | Chromium on datacenter IPs; no fingerprint rotation or CAPTCHA solving |
| Proxies | Residential proxies in 195+ countries, on by default, $5 per GB; bring your own at $0.20 per GB | Managed proxies in 100+ countries at $10 per GB on paid plans; bring your own on Enterprise only | None managed; you can run your own proxy client inside the VM |
| Running your own code | No shell on the machine running the browser | Firecracker sandboxes with exec, process and PTY terminal APIs and a sudo user; no SSH | SSH and root on every machine, any language |
| Docker and nested virtualization | No | Docker builds images on your machine; Docker or /dev/kvm inside a sandbox is not documented | Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Files after a stop | Browser profiles keep cookies and logins; workspaces sync up to 950 MiB of files between runs | A stopped sandbox is gone; files survive on a mounted volume or in a memory snapshot you take | The disk persists, saved every minute and on stop |
| Snapshots and fork | None | Memory snapshot of a running sandbox, then start many new sandboxes from it | Fork a running sandbox with its disk; no memory snapshots |
| Hosted agents | Its own hosted browser agent with a choice of models, a session queue and an events API | Hosted HyperAgent, Browser Use and computer-use models; sandbox images with the Claude Code or Codex CLI | Seven coding agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Desktop and live view | Live view of the browser you can embed for review or takeover, plus a recording | Live view and recordings of the Chrome session | A full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, or Chrome alone; embed it, record it |
| Serving ports | No way to serve your own ports | HTTPS URL per exposed sandbox port through a shared regional proxy; no raw TCP | 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-central, us-east, us-west and europe-west; asia-south on Enterprise and Select plans | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
| Open source | The browser-use agent library is MIT, about 118k GitHub stars, and runs on your own machine | No | No |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Browser Use | Hyperbrowser | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | No | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | Yes | 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 | No | Yes |
| Pause/resume | No | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | No | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | Yes | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | No | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | Yes | 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 | Not published | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | 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 | No | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | No | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Not published | 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 Hyperbrowser do not publish the CPU or memory behind a browser, and neither is in StarSling's CPU benchmark, where boat scored 26.69 runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB. Hyperbrowser publishes start times of under 500 ms for a ready browser and under 50 ms for a sandbox.
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 Hyperbrowser 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 | Hyperbrowser, 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 | $16 · 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 | $73 · 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 | $792 · Scale · 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 | $450 · Scale · 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 | $994 · Scale · 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. Traffic is extra ($5 per GB through the residential proxy, on by default, or $0.20 per GB direct), and agent runs add model tokens plus a 20% fee.
Hyperbrowser: Hyperbrowser spends one credit balance at $0.001 a credit: browsers cost $0.10 a browser-hour plus $10 per GB of proxy data, and sandboxes $0.045 per vCPU-hour plus $0.015 per GiB-hour. Startup ($30) and Scale ($100) turn their fee into credits that reset each month.
Hyperbrowser: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second while a sandbox runs. 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 price a browser session of a size they do not publish. Browser Use agent browsers stop after 4 hours, and its concurrency rises with lifetime payments: 50 sessions need $200 paid and 1,000 need $25,000. Hyperbrowser's browsers keep no disk, and Scale allows 100 at once, so 300 sessions for your users or 1,000 short jobs need Enterprise. boat fits every scenario except 1,000 short jobs at once, where bursts above 90 starts a minute are queued.
| Scenario | Browser Use | Hyperbrowser | 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 many short browser tasks on sites with strong bot checks at the lowest browser-hour price, or want an open-source agent you can also run yourself.
- A fifth of the browser-hour price. For teams running many browser hours: $0.02 per browser-hour against Hyperbrowser's $0.10, and residential proxy data at $5 per GB against $10.
- Stealth on by default. For sites with strong bot checks: hardened Chromium, random fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies come on every account, not only paid plans.
- An open-source agent you can run anywhere. For teams that want to own the agent: the browser-use library is MIT and runs locally, and the cloud runs the same agent for you.
Use Hyperbrowser when
you want browsers, short code sandboxes started from memory snapshots and per-page fetch and search APIs on one credit balance, or need US and Asia regions.
- Sandboxes next to the browsers. For agents that also run code: Firecracker sandboxes up to 32 vCPU and 256 GiB, started from memory snapshots, on the same credits.
- Web data without a browser. For scraping by the page: Fetch, Scrape and Search APIs are billed per page or query, so simple pages need no browser session.
- Longer browsers and more regions. For longer jobs near US users: browser sessions run up to 12 hours, in three US regions, Europe, and Asia on Enterprise.
Where boat fits
Both are browser companies first, so if what you are really running is agents that browse and then work on what they found, look at boat. A boat sandbox is a full Linux VM with Chromium, a 60fps desktop, Docker and a disk that stays, and it runs as long as the task takes. Keep Browser Use or Hyperbrowser for stealth scraping at volume, which boat does not do.
A whole machine around the browser
Browser Use gives no shell at all, and Hyperbrowser's sandboxes are a separate product with no documented Docker. An agent that clones a repo, runs docker compose and tests in a browser needs a second machine on either.
No time cap, and the disk stays
Browser Use agent browsers stop at 4 hours and Hyperbrowser sandboxes at 24, losing their disk unless you saved a volume or memory snapshot. boat has no cap on paid plans and saves the disk every minute.
Coding agents driven from outside, keys kept out
Browser Use types secrets into the page, where the browser can read them, and Hyperbrowser passes keys in as environment variables. boat's credentials proxy keeps real keys outside the sandbox for any HTTPS API, and seven coding agents come preinstalled.
Use boat when your agent does more than browse: it needs a shell, Docker, files and 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 Hyperbrowser.
Questions people ask
Is Browser Use cheaper than Hyperbrowser?
Yes, per browser-hour: $0.02 against $0.10, and proxy data at $5 per GB against $10. In the table, 50 agents in parallel come to $178 on Browser Use against $792 on Hyperbrowser, though neither fits that scenario as a general machine.
Which is faster, Browser Use or Hyperbrowser?
Neither publishes the CPU behind a browser, and neither is in StarSling's CPU benchmark, so there is no fair speed comparison. Hyperbrowser says a browser is ready in under 500 ms. boat scored 26.69 runs per second on that benchmark at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Browser Use or Hyperbrowser run Docker?
Browser Use gives no shell on the machine running the browser. Hyperbrowser uses Docker on your own machine to build sandbox images, but its docs do not describe Docker inside a sandbox. Every boat sandbox runs Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
How long can a session run on each?
Browser Use agent browsers stop after 4 hours. Hyperbrowser browsers run up to 12 hours and its sandboxes up to 24 hours from VM start. boat has no session cap on paid plans and keeps the disk when a sandbox stops.
Which is better at getting past bot checks?
Browser Use turns on stealth, fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies for every account, and ranks 1st for undetectable mass scraping against Hyperbrowser's 11th. Hyperbrowser keeps proxies and CAPTCHA solving for paid plans and ultra stealth for Enterprise. boat runs Chromium on datacenter IPs.
Can I run the Browser Use agent on Hyperbrowser or boat?
Yes. Hyperbrowser hosts Browser Use as one of its agents, and the MIT library runs on a boat sandbox with Python, Chromium and a desktop, with your model keys behind boat's credentials proxy.
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