Browser infrastructure for agents: Browser Use vs Browserbase vs Steel vs Hyperbrowser
Agent libraries like browser-use and Stagehand decide what to click; something still has to run the browsers they click in. At small scale that's Chrome on your own machine. At production scale it becomes its own operations problem: hundreds of concurrent sessions, sites that block automation, CAPTCHAs, logins that must persist between runs, and recordings you'll need when a run goes wrong. Browser infrastructure vendors sell exactly that: hosted browsers with the ugly parts handled. These three are the names buyers actually weigh, and Browser Use Cloud is the hosted lane from the team behind the browser-use library (our browser-agents guide covers the other two lanes: agent libraries and MCP tool servers).
| Browser Use Cloud | Browserbase | Steel | Hyperbrowser | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it sells | Managed stealth Chromium driven over CDP, plus a hosted agent API on the same browsers | Managed cloud browsers with automation, search, and extraction APIs | An open-source browser API you run hosted or self-hosted | Cloud browsers with agent-focused scraping and extraction APIs |
| Open source? | No: closed infra; its open source is the browser-use agent library (119k stars, MIT) and Browser Harness (18.6k stars, MIT) | No: closed infra; its open source is the Stagehand SDK and an MCP server | Yes: steel-dev/steel-browser (7.5k stars, Apache-2.0) is the actual product core, Docker-deployable | No: closed infra; peripheral MIT tooling only |
| Steward | Browser Use, the browser-use library's maintainers | Browserbase ($40M Series B, company blog) | Nen Labs | Hyperbrowser (Y Combinator) |
| Anti-bot and CAPTCHAs | Stealth Chromium included on every session, CAPTCHA handling, residential proxies in 195+ countries, per its docs | Via partnerships (Cloudflare, Fingerprint), per its docs | Stealth mode, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, per its docs | "Ultra Stealth Mode"; CAPTCHA solving priced into agent steps, per its docs |
| Session recording | Yes, MP4 recordings (opt-in) plus a live view that can allow human takeover (docs) | Yes, every agent step plus live view | Yes, session replays | Yes, video recordings |
| Logged-in state between runs | Persistent profiles, plus cookie sync from your local Chrome | Context-style persistence | Persistent profiles | Profiles via API |
| Pricing shape (checked 2026-08-12; Browser Use 2026-10-23) | Pure usage, no subscription: $0.02 per browser-hour, residential proxy $5/GB, $1 free credit to start | Base fee plus usage: free tier, then $20 and $99/month tiers with browser-hour overage around $0.10 to $0.12/hr | Usage-based with plan fees: $0/month plus $30 one-time credit to start, $250/month at scale | Pure credits (1,000 = $1): $0.10 per browser-hour, $0.02 per agent step |
| Works with | Any CDP client (Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium); the browser-use agent natively | Stagehand natively; LangChain, CrewAI, Mastra | Framework-agnostic: any Playwright or Puppeteer stack | Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and browser-use agents built in |
Only Steel has an open-source core, so this page carries no star-ranked table; Steel's list entry lives in Libraries and SDKs. Pricing shapes summarize each vendor's own pricing page on the date shown; check them before committing.
Pick by situation
Three independent comparison write-ups (APIScout, PkgPulse, and Steel's own head-to-head, bias noted) land on the same split, which is rare enough to trust. Browser Use Cloud is not covered by those write-ups:
- Cost per browser-hour or getting past bot checks decides it → Browser Use Cloud. $0.02 per browser-hour with no subscription, the lowest listed price of the four, with stealth, CAPTCHA handling, and profiles included and proxies metered separately. Its own Stealth Bench V2 puts it first on 100 bot-protected sites (vendor benchmark, bias noted: the sites were picked where it historically got through). The trade: closed infra and hosted only, no self-hosting.
- You want the safest managed default with the most polish → Browserbase. The most mature tooling story (Stagehand is its SDK), session visibility on every agent step, and the most generous named free tier of the three. The trade: fully closed, and features track plan level.
- Openness or self-hosting is a buying criterion → Steel. The only one whose core you can read, run in your own Docker, and walk away from without losing the integration; the hosted product is the same code with the ops handled. This is also the pick when procurement rules out closed infra handling logged-in sessions.
- You're scraping or crawling at volume, agent-first → Hyperbrowser. Credit pricing that meters agent steps rather than plans, stealth as the headline feature, and built-in support for driving it from browser-use and the major model providers.
Also in the lane, one tier out: Browserless, the long-running self-hosted headless-Chrome standard, and Anchor Browser, a newer managed entrant focused on agent identity. Neither shows up in buyer comparisons as often as these three yet.
The question to ask first
Does your agent hold credentials? A hosted browser that logs into your users' accounts concentrates real risk with the vendor: recordings, cookies, and persistent profiles all live on someone else's infrastructure. If the answer is yes and that sentence made you uncomfortable, Steel's self-hosted mode is the escape hatch the others don't offer. If the answer is no (public-web scraping, testing, research), pick on developer experience and unit economics, which is the fight Browserbase and Hyperbrowser are actually having.
Part of best-of-Agent-Harnesses. New to this decision? Start with How to pick a harness. Spot an error or a stale claim? Open an issue.
Agents can query this page's data directly: claude mcp add agent-harnesses -- uvx agent-harnesses-mcp (MCP server).