Browserbase

Browserbase's MCP server gives Claude control of a real headless Chrome instance running in the cloud. Instead of scraping HTML or parsing DOM snapshots, you get a full browser with JavaScript execution, session persistence, and built-in recording. I've used it to automate multi-step workflows that break with traditional scraping: logging into dashboards, filling forms that validate client-side, or capturing rendered charts that only exist after React hydrates. The setup is straightforward if you already have a Browserbase account. You drop your API key and project ID into environment variables, add the server to your Claude Desktop config, and Claude can immediately spin up sessions. The real win is session recording. Every interaction is captured as a video, which makes debugging far easier than staring at error logs. Proxy support is there if you need geo-specific browsing or want to route through your own infrastructure. It's genuinely good for tasks where you need a real browser: testing web apps, scraping SPAs that rely on JavaScript, automating workflows across multiple sites with logins. I'd reach for this when I need to interact with a site as a human would, not just fetch static HTML. The session persistence means you can pause, inspect, and resume without losing state. Quirks: you're paying for hosted browser time, so this isn't free compute. If your task can be solved with a simple HTTP request or a static scraper, you're overpaying. The MCP server itself is lean, which is good, but it assumes you understand Browserbase's session model. If you've never used their platform, the abstraction might feel opaque at first. Also, this is tightly coupled to Browserbase's infrastructure. You can't swap in a local Puppeteer instance without rewriting the server. Skip this if you're just fetching public HTML or if you don't want to manage API credits. But if you're automating browser-dependent tasks and want Claude to handle the interaction layer, this is the cleanest option I've found. It's vendor-locked, but the vendor actually knows what they're doing.