Browserless alternative: Browserberg compared
Both run Chromium for agents. They differ on where your session data is processed, whether the product helps you evade bot detection, and what happens to your credentials.
Browserberg and Browserless, side by side
Competitor figures come from Browserless's published pricing and documentation on the date below. Where a figure is a vendor's own claim rather than an independent measurement, it says so.
| Browserberg | Browserless | |
|---|---|---|
| Where sessions run | EU bare metal (OVHcloud) | US-operated, EU datacentre mentioned |
| Bot posture | Authenticated-first, no stealth | Stealth and CAPTCHA solving offered |
| Price per browser hour | EUR 0.08–0.09/hr | Unit-based (1 unit = 30s) |
| Free tier | 5 hours | 1,000 units |
| Credential vault | Yes — encrypted, site-scoped, never in model context | No |
| Human takeover | Yes — live view with single-writer lease | No |
As of 2026-08-30 · Competitor details come from each vendor's published pricing page on that date.
What Browserless is
Browserless
Browserless is the mature headless-browser service in the category: Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium support, a REST API, BrowserQL, an MCP server, a self-hostable Docker image, and SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR compliance.
Where Browserless is the better fit
A comparison page that never recommends the competitor is an advert, not a comparison.
- Browserless
- Browserless is genuinely good at what it is: a stable, well-documented headless-browser service with a self-host path. If you want to run the whole thing on your own hardware today, their Docker image is a real answer and ours is not yet.
Where Browserberg is the better fit
Unit billing is hard to forecast
A unit is 30 seconds, residential proxy traffic costs 6 units per megabyte, and a CAPTCHA costs 10 units. Modelling a month's spend means modelling your traffic profile first.
BrowserQL is closed
Their query layer is proprietary. Building on it is a commitment that is expensive to reverse; our wire protocol is Apache-2.0 and the schema is published.
No sovereignty story
An EU datacentre option is not the same as EU-sovereign operation, and it does not answer a CLOUD Act question about a US-operated vendor.
Questions people actually ask
How do units compare to an hourly price?
A unit is 30 seconds of browser time, so 120 units is an hour. The complication is that residential proxy traffic costs 6 units per megabyte and a CAPTCHA costs 10, so your effective hourly rate depends on page weight and how much proxying you do.
Can I self-host Browserberg the way I can self-host Browserless?
No. Their Docker image is a genuine self-host path; our runtime is closed source. We ship a free dev container for local development and CI, but production runs on our infrastructure. If self-hosting is a hard requirement, they are the better answer.
Is BrowserQL worth the lock-in?
That is a judgement call and it depends how much of your logic ends up expressed in it. It is a proprietary query layer, so the cost of leaving grows with use. Our wire protocol is Apache-2.0 with a published schema, which is a different trade rather than an obviously better one.
Other comparisons
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Browserbase
Browserbase is the category leader and the most complete managed offering: Stagehand as an MIT-licensed SDK, contexts, replays, an MCP server, SOC 2 and HIPAA, and a founding seat on Cloudflare's Signed Agents programme.
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Steel
Steel is the open-source answer to Browserbase: Apache-2.
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Hyperbrowser
Hyperbrowser leads with stealth.
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Kernel
Kernel is the cheapest serious option and the most infrastructure-shaped: unikernel and microVM isolation, sessions that can run for 72 hours, browser pools, per-second billing and ISO 27001.
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Anchor Browser
Anchor is our closest strategic neighbour and the comparison we take most seriously.
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Browser Use Cloud
Browser Use is the benchmark leader and the cheapest per hour in the category: 84.
Settle it with your own script
Five browser hours free, no card. Point an existing Playwright or Puppeteer script at our endpoint and compare the result yourself.