Cloud browsers for AI agents, compared.

A cloud browser is a web browser that runs on a provider's servers instead of your device. The kind compared here is driven by your code or AI agent over the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), with Playwright, Puppeteer or an agent framework, and billed for the time it runs. The term also covers products you do not drive with code: remote browser isolation and consumer cloud browsers, which you browse by hand to keep your own machine out of reach, and ChatGPT's cloud browser, which gives ChatGPT Work its own browser on a separate computer in the cloud. This page compares the kind your code drives.

For agents and scripts, yes, to start: every provider in this comparison has a free plan or signup credits (see the Plans column in the table). Past those you pay for browser time at the rates in the table. To self-host without a software license fee, Steel's steel-browser is open source (Apache-2.0) and Browserless is free for non-commercial use; you still pay for the servers that run them. Free cloud browsers you use by hand, such as Browser.lol, are a different product.

For most AI agents, Browser Use Cloud. It costs $0.02 per browser-hour with no subscription, the lowest of the 7 providers compared here, and got through on 90.5% of visits on Stealth Bench V2, ahead of Anchor at 82% and Browserbase at 78.5%. The 100 sites were picked because Browser Use Cloud historically got through where stock Chrome with a US proxy did not. They are hard on purpose and not a balanced sample of the web or of anti-bot vendors. It is not the fastest to start a session: Tilion and Kernel are. To self-host, use Browserless or Steel. Pick Browserbase if Stagehand is central to your stack, Kernel if session start time matters most, and Anchor if you need managed logins.

Browser Use Cloud, at $0.02 per browser-hour, billed by the minute, with no subscription. The next lowest list prices are Anchor at $0.05 (plus $0.01 per browser created; full stealth from the $2,000/month Growth plan) and Kernel at $0.06 to $0.48 (headless to headful, billed per second; plans $0 to $200/month). Residential proxies are $5/GB on Browser Use Cloud; Kernel does not meter its own proxies.

Per browser-hour, from each provider's own pricing page, checked October 24, 2026: Browser Use Cloud $0.02 (pay as you go, billed by the minute, no subscription); Anchor $0.05 (plus $0.01 per browser created; full stealth from the $2,000/month Growth plan); Kernel $0.06 to $0.48 (headless to headful, billed per second; plans $0 to $200/month); Browserbase $0.10 to $0.12 (after 100 or 500 hours included in $20 or $99/month plans); Browserless $0.18 to $0.24 (overage, billed in 30-second units; plans $25 to $350/month); Steel $0.08 to $0.10 ($0.08 on the $250/month Scale plan; stealth browser on Enterprise); Hyperbrowser $0.10 (billed in credits; plans $0 to $100/month, Free includes 5,000 credits).

Tilion, then Kernel. On BrowserArena's October 14, 2026 run, Tilion was fastest overall; of the providers on this page the median time to create, connect, load and release a session was Kernel 318 ms, Browser Use Cloud 493 ms, Browserbase 877 ms, Hyperbrowser 1,417 ms, Anchor 2,800 ms, Steel 3,509 ms. ComputeSDK's October 9, 2026 lifecycle scores agree: Tilion first, then Kernel 96.4, Browser Use Cloud 95.2.

Browserless and Steel. Browserless runs in Docker or Kubernetes and needs a commercial license for commercial use. Steel's steel-browser is open source (Apache-2.0) and runs in Docker. Anchor offers bring-your-own-cloud or on-prem on its Enterprise plan, and Kernel publishes its browser image as open source. Browserbase does not offer on-prem. Browser Use Cloud is hosted by default, with an EU region. On-prem deployment of browsers and agents is available to enterprise customers through sales. The open-source browser-use library (MIT) runs on your own machine.

300 browsers for 8 hours a day, 22 days a month is 52,800 browser-hours: about $1,056 on Browser Use Cloud at $0.02/hour, against $5,280 at Browserbase's listed $0.10. That is its listed rate extrapolated: past 250 browsers Browserbase sells its Scale plan through sales, at a price it does not publish. Browser Use Cloud raises concurrency with each project's lifetime paid spend (settled payments, net of refunds and disputes; credits do not count): 250 at $1,000, 500 at $5,000, 1,000 at $25,000. Most others raise it by plan tier, and past a few hundred browsers through sales.

It can be, for steady workloads on sites without bot protection. Estimated cost per browser-hour is instance price ÷ (browsers per instance × share of time busy), plus proxy and engineering cost per browser-hour. On an AWS c7i.xlarge at $0.1785/hour with 10 to 20 browsers, that is $0.010 to $0.036, against $0.02 on Browser Use Cloud. On bot-protected sites, plain headless Chrome got through on 3% of Stealth Bench V2 visits against 90.5% for Browser Use Cloud, on a sample picked where Browser Use Cloud historically got through and stock Chrome did not, so not a balanced sample.

Timeouts: Put a timeout on every step and on the whole job. A client-side timeout does not cancel the run or stop the browser on the server, so check what the first attempt did before you start another. Stop browsers explicitly: Closing Playwright or the CDP connection does not stop a cloud browser. It keeps billing and holds a concurrency slot until you stop it through the API, so stop it in a finally block. Profiles: Save logins in a profile and reuse it, instead of signing in on every run. Proxies: Proxy traffic is billed per GB, so budget for it next to browser-hours. A new browser does not guarantee a new IP or a particular city. Concurrency: Read your project's limit from the account API (every key in a project shares it) and keep the backlog in your own job queue; start only as many browsers as the limit allows. Retries: Retry transient failures with backoff and honor the Retry-After header on a 429. Do not retry blindly after a step that submits a form or pays.

No. Browser Use Cloud is hosted browser infrastructure: remote Chromium you connect to over CDP from Playwright, Puppeteer or your own agent, with stealth, CAPTCHA solving and residential proxies on by default, at $0.02 per browser-hour. The open-source browser-use library is a separate Python agent library that runs on your machine.

Share of 200 scheduled visits (100 sites × 2 runs) where a judge model, shown the page without the provider name, confirmed the real site loaded within 60 seconds. Every provider ran with its own proxy and CAPTCHA solver, and with the stealth setting its standard plans offer; Steel's standard plans have none, and Browserbase ran its standard mode because its Verified mode needs an Enterprise plan. Results: Browser Use Cloud 90.5%, Anchor 82%, Kernel 80.5%, Browserbase 78.5%, Browserless 77.5%, Steel 74.5%, Hyperbrowser 73.5%. The 100 sites were picked because Browser Use Cloud historically got through where stock Chrome with a US proxy did not. They are hard on purpose and not a balanced sample of the web or of anti-bot vendors. Runner, encrypted site list and raw results are public.