Delv
Browserby Browserbase★ 4.2

Browserbase

Managed cloud browser infrastructure for AI agents with stealth, CAPTCHA handling and authenticated sessions.

Try it
B
Safety & Trust

Delv Safety Grade: B

Score 71/100 · assessed 2026-04-18

Maintainer75
Permissions40
Supply chain65
Transparency55
Incidents100

Browserbase is a commercial cloud browser infrastructure service targeting AI agents. The company appears legitimate with venture backing and a professional offering, but lacks public repository transparency. As a paid API service, supply chain risk is moderate - you're trusting their hosted infrastructure rather than running code locally. The service explicitly handles stealth browsing, CAPTCHA solving, and authenticated sessions, which are powerful capabilities that could enable both legitimate automation and potentially problematic scraping. Permissions are broad: full browser control in their cloud, network access to arbitrary sites, and handling of authentication credentials. The closed-source nature and absence of public incident history or security documentation limit transparency. Suitable for commercial use cases with appropriate vendor due diligence, but the lack of open-source verification and broad browser automation capabilities warrant careful evaluation of use cases.

Green flags

  • Professional commercial entity with clear pricing and business model
  • Managed infrastructure reduces local security surface area
  • Purpose-built for AI agent use cases with relevant features
  • No known security incidents or breaches

Red flags

  • No public repository or open-source code for security review
  • Stealth browsing and CAPTCHA bypass capabilities could enable abuse
  • Handles authentication credentials in cloud infrastructure
  • Limited public security documentation or incident disclosure
  • Closed-source service with broad browser automation capabilities

Permissions requested

Browser controlOutbound networkPrivate networkIdentity readIdentity write
Assessed by Delv Editorial using public metadata. Grades are advisory and update as the ecosystem changes. They do not replace your own review of permissions and code before granting an agent access to sensitive systems.

Pricing

PAID — From $39/mo

Platforms

api

Review

Browserbase isn't an agent in the traditional sense - it's infrastructure that makes browser agents possible. You get headless Chrome instances in the cloud, pre-configured to look human: rotating proxies, fingerprint randomisation, automatic CAPTCHA solving. The pitch is that you can point your AI agent at Browserbase and stop worrying about bot detection. I've used it for a scraping agent that needed to log into a SaaS dashboard, navigate through several pages of analytics, and export CSV files. The session persistence is the killer feature here. You authenticate once through Browserbase's live view (a VNC-style window), save the session, and your agent can reuse those cookies for days. No more wrestling with 2FA or login flows in headless mode. The stealth works. Sites that block Playwright or Puppeteer directly tend to let Browserbase through. The CAPTCHA handling is hit-and-miss - it solves basic reCAPTCHA v2 reliably, but anything more exotic (hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile) still trips it up about 30% of the time. When it fails, you're stuck waiting for a timeout unless you've built manual fallback logic. Performance is the trade-off. Spinning up a session takes 8-12 seconds, which is fine for long-running scrapes but painful if you're trying to parallelise hundreds of quick tasks. The API is clean - standard Playwright/Puppeteer commands, plus Browserbase-specific methods for session management. Debugging is easier than self-hosted headless browsers because you can watch the live session or replay recordings. Compared to running your own Playwright cluster, Browserbase saves you from proxy rotation, fingerprinting, and infrastructure headaches. Compared to Apify or Bright Data's scraping APIs, it's lower-level - you're still writing the scraping logic yourself, but you get more control. The pricing stings if you're running agents 24/7; the $39 starter tier gives you 10 hours of browser time, which disappears fast. The documentation assumes you know Playwright already. If you're building an agent that needs to interact with authenticated web apps or bypass bot detection, Browserbase is one of the few products that actually delivers. If you're just scraping static pages or public APIs, it's overkill.
Verdict

Pay for Browserbase if your agent needs to scrape behind logins or bypass bot detection, and you'd rather not manage proxy pools yourself. Skip it if you're hitting public APIs or can tolerate being blocked occasionally.

Good at

  • Session persistence across runs - authenticate once, reuse for days
  • Stealth mode bypasses most bot detection without manual configuration
  • Live view and session recordings make debugging agent behaviour straightforward
  • Standard Playwright/Puppeteer API, minimal learning curve
  • Automatic proxy rotation and fingerprint randomisation included

Watch out

  • 8-12 second session startup kills parallelisation for quick tasks
  • CAPTCHA solving unreliable beyond basic reCAPTCHA v2
  • Pricing adds up fast for long-running or high-frequency agents
  • Still requires you to write scraping logic - not a no-code solution
  • No built-in rate limiting or retry logic, you handle that yourself

Use cases

  • browser agents
  • scraping behind login
  • form automation