Hyperbrowser vs Zenrows
Both rent you a remote Chrome to drive over CDP. Hyperbrowser keeps a browser open for up to 12 hours, solves CAPTCHAs and also sells code sandboxes, while Zenrows closes each session after at most 15 minutes and leans on a huge rotating pool of residential IPs and scraping APIs.
The companies and products
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.
Zenrows
Zenrows calls itself web data infrastructure built for agents and applications: APIs that fetch, extract, crawl and browse protected websites.
Browser Sessions (formerly Scraping Browser) is a remote Chrome you connect to over a WebSocket and drive with Puppeteer or Playwright through the Chrome DevTools Protocol. Each session runs on rotating residential IPs and closes after 1 to 15 minutes. It is a different kind of product from boat: a managed browser for scraping and web tasks, not a machine you get a shell on, so this page compares where the two overlap, which is browser and web agents.
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. “20th cheapest of 367” means 19 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 | Hyperbrowser: price rank | Zenrows: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Zenrows has no shell, disk or Docker, and Hyperbrowser's sandboxes lose their disk on stop and do not document Docker inside, so a coding agent fits boat better than either. | 136th of 367, with limits $1,206 a month | 59th of 367, with limits $448 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that lives on its machine all month hits Zenrows's 15-minute session cap and Hyperbrowser's 24-hour sandbox lifetime; boat has no session cap on paid plans. | 255th of 366, with limits $3,650 a month | 126th of 366, with limits $833 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 Neither browser service is built for code interpreter bursts, though Hyperbrowser's sandboxes can start many runs from one memory snapshot. | 244th of 345, with limits $246 a month | 232nd of 345, with limits $166 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 | 245th of 361, with limits $1,029 a month | 203rd of 361, with limits $361 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 | 262nd of 360, with limits $4,972 a month | 229th of 360, with limits $1,111 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 | 253rd of 364, with limits $400 a month | 230th of 364, with limits $166 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 | 238th of 377, with limits $120 a month | 221st of 377, with limits $83 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 240th of 368, with limits $73 a month | 232nd of 368, with limits $58 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 Hyperbrowser runs hosted computer-use models inside its browser and Zenrows exposes screenshots and page actions over CDP or MCP, while boat streams a 60fps Linux desktop where the agent can use any app. | 144th of 369, with limits $360 a month | 93rd of 369, with limits $166 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 fit browser-use agents: Zenrows ranks 5th with short residential-IP sessions, Hyperbrowser ranks 20th with sessions up to 12 hours, and boat ranks 7th with Chromium on a full VM that also runs code. | 20th cheapest of 367 $360 a month | 5th cheapest of 367 $166 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 All three fit startup-scale scraping; Zenrows and Hyperbrowser both sell per-page fetch APIs with anti-bot bypass, while boat runs your own scrapers, queues and databases on one machine. | 32nd cheapest of 346 $366 a month | 18th cheapest of 346 $227 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 Hyperbrowser ranks 11th for undetectable mass scraping because it solves CAPTCHAs and offers stealth modes, while Zenrows Browser Sessions cannot solve CAPTCHAs and meters bandwidth at 25,000 credits per GB. | 11th of 338, with limits $9,750 a month | 70th of 338, with limits $1,791 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 Hyperbrowser ranks 33rd and Zenrows 149th for red teaming, since only Hyperbrowser offers a machine to attack at all, and boat ranks 2nd with a full VM per agent. | 33rd of 360, with limits $356 a month | 149th of 360, with limits $115 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 | Hyperbrowser | Zenrows | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | Cloud browser sessions first, plus Firecracker sandboxes, web data APIs and hosted browser agents | Web data service: Browser Sessions plus Fetch, Extract, Crawl and Batch APIs | A full Linux VM per sandbox, with a desktop and Chromium inside |
| Browser session length | Browser sessions up to 12 hours; sandboxes up to 24 hours from VM start | 1 to 15 minutes, 3 by default, then the session closes | No cap on paid plans; you set the time to live |
| Files after a session | A stopped sandbox is gone; files survive on a mounted volume or in a memory snapshot you take | Session closes and frees its resources; no saved state documented | The disk persists, with snapshots every minute and on stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Running code | Firecracker sandboxes from 1 to 32 vCPU and up to 256 GiB RAM, driven through exec and terminal APIs | No shell; browser control over CDP only | Root, SSH, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm on every machine, 4 vCPU / 8 GB by default and up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB |
| Browser control | Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP, with saved profiles, live view and recordings | Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP; viewport, user agent and some device settings are blocked | Chromium on your own VM: install Playwright, Puppeteer, extensions or any tool, and change any setting |
| Outbound IPs | Residential proxies on paid plans at $10 per GB of proxy data; static IPs available | Over 55 million residential IPs in 190+ countries, rotating on every request, with country targeting | Traffic leaves from EU data centers; bring your own proxy if you need other IPs |
| CAPTCHA and stealth | Stealth mode and automatic CAPTCHA solving on paid plans; ultra stealth on Enterprise | Anti-bot bypass on its tools; Browser Sessions cannot solve CAPTCHAs, the Fetch API has anti-CAPTCHA features | None built in; you run your own tools |
| Desktop and computer use | Hosted HyperAgent, Browser Use and computer-use models inside its browser; no desktop | No desktop stream; screenshots and page actions through CDP or MCP tools | 60fps desktop stream with Chromium and computer use, embeddable in your app |
| Scraping APIs and MCP | Fetch, Scrape and Search APIs per page or query, plus an MCP server | Fetch, Extract, Crawl and Batch APIs on one credit balance, plus a hosted or local MCP server | No scraping APIs or MCP server; agents drive the sandbox through the API and CLI |
| Concurrency on self-serve plans | 1, 25 and 100 at once on Free, Startup and Scale; 1,000+ on Enterprise | 5 at once on Free, rising by plan to 400 on Scale S5 | Parallel sandboxes by plan; bursts above 90 starts a minute are queued |
| Coding agents | Sandbox base images with the Claude Code, Codex or OpenClaw CLI, run through the exec API | Tools for your agent to call; no agent runs inside Zenrows | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Hosting from the machine | HTTPS URL per exposed sandbox port through a shared regional proxy; no raw TCP or own IP | None; you connect out to a shared Zenrows endpoint | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Keeping API keys out | Keys are passed in as environment variables to the process | Not documented; auth is your Zenrows API key | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Where it runs | us-central, us-east, us-west and europe-west; asia-south on Enterprise and Select | Primarily hosted on DigitalOcean, no region to choose; proxy exits worldwide | EU only (Germany, Finland, France), with EU data residency and zero data retention |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Hyperbrowser | Zenrows | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | No | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Systemd | No | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | No | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | No | No | Yes |
| Pause/resume | No | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | Yes | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | No | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | Not published | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | No | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | Not published | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | No | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | No | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Not published | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either. Hyperbrowser and Zenrows were not in StarSling's public CPU benchmark and neither publishes the CPU or memory behind a browser session. boat did 26.69 runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that benchmark.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Hyperbrowser and Zenrows 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 | Hyperbrowser, a month | Zenrows, 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 | $16 · Free · with limits | $2,499 · Scale S5 (annual) · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $73 · Free · with limits | $2,499 · Scale S5 (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 | $792 · Scale · with limits | $2,499 · Scale S5 (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 | $450 · Scale · with limits | $2,499 · Scale S5 (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 | $994 · Scale · with limits | $2,499 · Scale S5 (annual) · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Hyperbrowser: Everything 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 monthly fee into credits; extra credits are bought by hand or by auto-reload.
Zenrows: Zenrows sells monthly credit plans shared by all its products, from a free plan of 5,000 credits up to Scale S5. A browser session costs 5 credits per minute plus bandwidth at 25,000 credits per GB, and plan credits expire at each renewal.
Zenrows: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee becomes usage credit spent per second while a sandbox runs. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Neither fits the machine scenarios on this page, because both are browser sessions with no published size and no disk that stays. Zenrows is limited hardest by its 15-minute session cap, which holds even on Scale S5 at $2,499 a month. Hyperbrowser browsers last up to 12 hours but its Scale plan allows 100 at once, so 300 sessions for your users or 1,000 short jobs need Enterprise. On boat, the 1,000-job burst is the one that does not fit: bursts above 90 starts a minute are queued.
| Scenario | Hyperbrowser | Zenrows | 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 Hyperbrowser when
your agent needs a browser for hours, CAPTCHAs solved on the way, regions in the US, or short code sandboxes next to the browser.
- Browsers that stay open for hours. Useful for long logged-in tasks: a Hyperbrowser browser session can last up to 12 hours, where Zenrows closes after 15 minutes.
- CAPTCHA solving and stealth. Useful for sites that throw CAPTCHAs: paid plans solve them automatically and add stealth mode, which Zenrows Browser Sessions cannot do.
- Code sandboxes next to the browser. Useful when the agent also runs code: Firecracker sandboxes up to 32 vCPU start from memory snapshots behind outbound rules.
Use Zenrows when
your agent opens protected pages for a few minutes at a time from residential IPs in many countries, or when you want scraping APIs and an MCP server on one credit balance.
- A huge residential IP pool. Useful for protected sites in many countries: over 55 million residential IPs in 190+ countries rotate on every request.
- Pay per browser minute. Good for short, spiky page visits: a session costs 5 credits a minute and closes on its own, and the free plan needs no card.
- More browsers at once on self-serve plans. Useful for wide crawls: Zenrows plans go up to 400 sessions at once, while Hyperbrowser's Scale plan stops at 100.
Where boat fits
Hyperbrowser and Zenrows are browser services, and boat is not a scraping network. If what you are really running is agents that browse as part of bigger work, such as logging in, downloading files, running code and Docker, and staying on for hours, a full VM per agent fits better than a rented tab. You can also keep both: run the agent on boat and call Hyperbrowser or Zenrows over CDP when it needs residential IPs.
A whole machine, not one browser tab
Zenrows gives a remote Chrome and no shell, and Hyperbrowser's sandboxes do not document Docker inside. On boat every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel, root, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm, so the agent browses and builds on one machine.
Work that outlives the session
A Zenrows session closes after 15 minutes, about 32 reconnects in an eight-hour shift, and Hyperbrowser browsers stop at 12 hours and sandboxes at 24, losing their disk. boat has no session cap on paid plans and saves the disk every minute.
A desktop to watch and keys kept outside
Neither streams a desktop, and both expect your keys inside the process. boat streams a 60fps desktop you can embed, drives Claude Code or Codex from outside, and its credentials proxy keeps real API keys out of the sandbox.
Use boat when browsing is one part of the work: logging in once and staying logged in, running code and Docker next to Chromium, keeping files on a disk, and watching the agent on a 60fps desktop for as long as the task takes. Compare it one to one: boat vs Hyperbrowser and boat vs Zenrows.
Questions people ask
Is Hyperbrowser cheaper than Zenrows?
For short browser work, usually not: the browser-use agents workload comes to $360 a month on Hyperbrowser against $166 on Zenrows, and startup-scale scraping to $366 against $227. For undetectable mass scraping both are a compromise, at $9,750 on Hyperbrowser against $1,791 on Zenrows.
Which is faster, Hyperbrowser or Zenrows?
Neither publishes the CPU behind a browser session, and neither is in the CPU benchmark this page uses, so there is no fair speed number. Hyperbrowser publishes start times under 500 ms for a ready browser and under 50 ms for sandboxes.
How long can a session run on Hyperbrowser and Zenrows?
A Hyperbrowser browser session lasts up to 12 hours and a sandbox up to 24 hours from VM start. A Zenrows session lasts 1 to 15 minutes, 3 by default, then closes. boat has no session cap on paid plans.
Which one solves CAPTCHAs?
Hyperbrowser solves CAPTCHAs automatically on its paid plans. Zenrows Browser Sessions cannot solve CAPTCHAs, though its Fetch API has anti-CAPTCHA features. boat solves no CAPTCHAs.
Can Hyperbrowser or Zenrows run Docker?
Zenrows gives no shell at all, only a browser over CDP. Hyperbrowser uses Docker on your own machine to build sandbox images, and its docs do not describe running Docker inside a sandbox. Every boat sandbox runs Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
Can I use boat with Hyperbrowser or Zenrows?
Yes. An agent on a boat sandbox can open a Hyperbrowser or Zenrows session over CDP when it needs residential IPs or CAPTCHA solving, and keep its code, files and tools on the boat VM.
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