OpenBrowse vs Browserbase
Browserbase rents you a browser to drive. OpenBrowse is the driver: an MIT-licensed, self-hosted agent that runs on hardware you already own, meters nothing, and keeps every page it opens inside your network.
- the agent is the part you were going to build on top of the browser anyway
- the pages and the data they hold must not leave your network
- you want the licence, the model choice and the API key to be yours
- you are reading listings in bulk and want 48 pages opened at once rather than one per call
- you would rather pay for tokens than for browser-hours, gigabytes, calls, runs and retention days
- you have browser automation already written and need somewhere to run it
- the sites you target need a residential IP in a country you choose
- you need a compliance attestation, recorded sessions, or more than a handful of browsers at once
OpenBrowse is the agent, not the browser. You post the job in plain words and it drives itself, so there is no CDP connect endpoint and no place to attach Playwright, Puppeteer or Stagehand code you have already written. That is the trade this page is about. If you want a remote browser to run your own automation on, Browserbase is built for exactly that. If the agent is the part you were going to build, read on.
Weighing this against a hosted agent runner rather than a hosted browser? The Browser Use Cloud comparison covers that one, and the benchmarks are the evidence under it.
Dimension by dimension
Twelve dimensions, from their published documentation and ours.
| Dimension | Browserbase | OpenBrowse |
|---|---|---|
| The agent | Browserbase Agents is hosted, on an undisclosed model, and rationed as a monthly run allowance. Stagehand is the framework whose loop you host yourself, on your own key | The agent is the whole product, not an allowance bolted onto a browser. You pick the model, you hold the key, and you run it as often as the hardware allows |
| Bulk page reads | One URL per Fetch call, and Fetch runs no JavaScript. Reading a listing in parallel is something you build | read_pages opens up to 48 URLs in parallel waves of six real tabs, including inside embedded cross-origin panels |
| Structured output | Stagehand's extract validates the shape against a schema, so a wrong value of the right type passes | Schema-validated, then evidence-gated: a value with nothing behind it on the page is refused at the answer-store boundary, and the agent cannot finish until every required field is filled or explicitly marked absent |
| Metering | Browser-hours, proxy gigabytes, Search calls, Fetch calls, agent runs and retention days, each metered separately | Nothing is metered at all. The only variable line on the bill is LLM tokens you were buying from the provider anyway, at their price, on your key |
| Connecting your own code | A CDP websocket per session. Point Playwright, Puppeteer or any CDP client at connectUrl and drive it yourself | By design, none. You state the outcome and the agent works the site out for itself, so there is nothing to attach an existing script to |
| Network egress | Managed residential proxies with country targeting across 201 countries, and state or city where it is available | Your machine's own IP, with no proxy layer and no country to select. On sites that do not gate by geography, that is one less hop and one less bill |
| Bot protection | Verified sessions with real fingerprints, automatic solving of supported CAPTCHAs, and a Cloudflare signed-agent integration | A stealth-configured Chromium, and CAPTCHA solving on your own CapSolver key. No agreements with the protection vendors behind it |
| Session records | Every session recorded as replayable video, plus screenshots and an inspector carrying the network and console timeline | Real-time VNC of the actual browser, a feed carrying the model's reasoning, and an IDE panel streaming the sandbox scripts as the agent writes them. All of it live; nothing is kept once the session ends |
| Concurrency | 3 concurrent browsers on Free, 25 on Developer, 100 on Startup, and 250 or more on Scale | Up to eight concurrent sessions, one by default, at roughly 2GB of memory each |
| Operations and compliance | A public status page, SOC 2 Type II, and HIPAA, SSO and a DPA on the top tier. No numeric uptime SLA is published | Yours to run. There is no attestation and no support line, though there is also no vendor between you and the data, and every line of what is running is public and auditable |
| Where the data goes | Every page the browser loads crosses their cloud. There is no on-premises or bring-your-own-cloud deployment | The browser, the pages it loads and the data it extracts never leave your machine. The only thing that goes out is the model call, on your key |
| Licence | The browser infrastructure is proprietary. Stagehand and the client SDKs are open source, but there is no server to run | MIT end to end: server, agent and dashboard, with a DOI so it can be cited. Fork it, audit it, run it for as long as you like |
What Browserbase charges
Browserbase sells a monthly plan that buys concurrency and an allowance, then meters six things on top of it.
| Item | Rate | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Browser time | $0.12 per browser-hour on Developer, $0.10 on Startup | Charged once a plan's included hours run out. Billed by the minute, with a one-minute minimum per session. |
| Proxy bandwidth | $12 per GB on Developer, $10 per GB on Startup | Billed by the megabyte, with a one-megabyte minimum per session. They publish no separate residential and datacentre rates. |
| Search API | $7 per 1,000 calls | The same rate on Developer and Startup. |
| Fetch API | $1 per 1,000 calls, or $4 per 1,000 through a proxy | One URL per call, no JavaScript execution, and a ten-second timeout. |
| Agent runs | a monthly allowance, no overage rate published | Three a month on Free, 15 on Developer, 50 on Startup. The model behind them is not disclosed. |
Source: www.browserbase.com/pricing
Measured, on a task anyone can rerun
Our extraction benchmark task, published in full. OpenBrowse recovered all 14 records without inventing a field, against Browser Use Cloud as the hosted comparison. Browserbase has not been put through it.
| Measure | OpenBrowse | Browser Use Cloud | Browserbase (not yet measured) |
|---|---|---|---|
| LLM cost | $0.24 | $0.78 | Not yet measured |
| Tokens | 202k | 859k | Not yet measured |
| Time to finish | 1m 47s | 2m 36s | Not yet measured |
| Records recovered of 14 | 14 | 14 | Not yet measured |
Compared to Browser Use Cloud, that is 69% less spend, 4.25x fewer tokens and 31% faster, on the same task, the same schema and the same cost cap.
FAQs
What does OpenBrowse cost to run?
LLM tokens. No plan, no browser-hours, no egress charge, no run allowance. On our extraction benchmark task it cost $0.24.
Is OpenBrowse open source in a way Browserbase is not?
Browserbase open-sources Stagehand and its SDKs, but the infrastructure behind them is proprietary and there is no server to run. OpenBrowse is MIT end to end.
Where does the data go?
Your machine. The browser, the pages and the extracted data stay there; only the model call leaves, on your key. Browserbase is managed cloud only.
How has OpenBrowse been benchmarked?
On our extraction benchmark task, 14 records behind an embedded cross-origin job board, across several models. Every run recovered all 14 without inventing a field. Browserbase has not been put through it.
See the benchmarkCan I point my existing Playwright code at OpenBrowse?
No. There is no connect endpoint, because driving the browser is the part OpenBrowse does for you. Existing automation is a rewrite, not a port.
What does Browserbase do better?
Residential proxies with country targeting, recorded sessions, verified fingerprints and CAPTCHA solving, 100 concurrent browsers against eight here, and SOC 2 Type II. If your workload turns on any of those, buy theirs.