Browserbase

Browserbase is managed headless-browser infrastructure for AI agents and web automation at scale. Instead of provisioning, patching, and babysitting your own Chromium fleet, you request a browser from Browserbase's API and get a real, sandboxed cloud session — with stealth, proxies, CAPTCHA handling, and a live view for watching what the agent does. It's aimed at teams running browser agents, scrapers, and automated workflows in production, where reliability and concurrency matter more than a one-off script.

It fits an AI-assisted workflow as the execution layer: your agent (or LLM-driven script) decides what to do, and Browserbase supplies the browser it acts in. A useful distinction — Browserbase is the hosted browsers; Stagehand is the open-source framework (MIT, from the same company) that adds natural-language control and can run either locally or on Browserbase's cloud.

Highlights

• Serverless cloud browsers — request a real browser session over an API and let it scale to many concurrent sessions; no infrastructure to provision or keep patched.
• Stealth, proxies, and CAPTCHA handling — built-in residential/datacenter proxies and anti-bot measures help automations reach sites that block naive headless traffic.
• Live session view and debugging — watch sessions in real time and review replays, logs, and network activity to diagnose why a run failed.
• Works with standard SDKs — drive sessions with Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP, or with Browserbase's own Stagehand framework, in TypeScript or Python.

In an AI-assisted workflow

Point an existing Playwright script at a Browserbase session instead of a local browser — the automation code barely changes, but the browser now runs in the cloud with stealth and proxies. See Browser Agents Compared (2026) for how the hosted-infra approach compares with all-in-one agents.

import { Browserbase } from "@browserbasehq/sdk";
import { chromium } from "playwright-core";
 
const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
const session = await bb.sessions.create({ projectId: process.env.BB_PROJECT_ID });
 
const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(session.connectUrl);
const page = (await browser.contexts())[0].pages()[0];
await page.goto("https://example.com");
// ...drive the page with your agent, then close the session

Good to know

Browserbase is a proprietary SaaS platform, not open source — the open-source piece is Stagehand, not the browser infrastructure itself. There is a free tier for prototyping plus paid plans (Free, Developer, Startup, and a custom Scale tier at publication), metered on browser-hours, concurrency, and proxy bandwidth; these change frequently, so confirm current tiers and limits on the official pricing page before you budget. For background on the agents that drive these browsers, see How Computer-Use Agents Work.