The Browser Automation Landscape in 2025
How new players and tools are shaping the browser automation and scraping industries
When approaching a new web scraping project, we start by choosing a tool that meets our needs. These tools usually fall into two categories: browserless (like Scrapy, which doesn’t have a browser natively) and browser automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer).
Their pros and cons are immediate: browserless tools, since they don’t need to spawn a real browser’s window, are faster and handle concurrency and parallelism better. At the same time, they’re inadequate (unless they’re plugged into Unblocker API) to bypass anti-bot solutions since they’re easily detectable.
On the contrary, browser automation tools can be programmed to imitate human interactions with the web: just like a real person would do, a browser’s window can be spawned, browse to a page, fill forms, and click buttons. Despite being slower, this approach is useful when we need to interact with the website’s objects and bypass anti-bot solutions by impersonating a real human.
In my scraping projects, I’ve tried to avoid browser automation tools as much as I could. They’re slow and expensive, making them unfit for a full scrape for medium or large-sized websites. The few managed browser automation services I tried in the past were unuseful from the web scraping perspective since they were meant to be used for web app developers and got easily detected.
Anti-detect browsers tried to fill this gap: they’re great at simulating a real user interacting with a browser, but they usually have the same scalability limits as browser automation tools. In the end, when using them, you’re just using a much better browser with the same infrastructure as before. This doesn’t mean they’re unuseful: when it comes to small scraping tasks, with a high level of anti-bot protection, they’re still the best solution on the market.
Today, the landscape is changing: there are more companies that are offering managed browser automation focused on web scraping. With the advent of AI and the need for web data for training it, they became sexier for a broader audience. Their unique selling proposition is that by connecting your Playwright/Puppeteer scraper to their infrastructure, you can finally forget about the infrastructure needed for running a browser, which has also been improved to avoid anti-bot mechanisms.
In this article, I’ll explain the differences between the tool families and create a map of today’s landscape.
The Early Days: Open-Source Browser Automation
Open-source tools have long been the foundation of web scraping and browser automation. Selenium is among the most widely used, offering support for multiple programming languages and enabling automated interactions with web pages. Even today, if you have a look at web scraping courses or tutorials around the web, you can still figure out how many programmers still rely on it. However, despite its versatility, Selenium has become increasingly easy to detect due to its reliance on standard WebDrivers, which many websites can identify as automation tools.
Another major open-source player is Puppeteer, a high-level API for controlling Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. Developed by Google, Puppeteer has been widely adopted for scraping JavaScript-heavy websites that require full browser execution. Its ability to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) and execute JavaScript has made it a go-to tool for many developers. However, like Selenium, Puppeteer is relatively easy to detect unless combined with stealth plugins that obscure its automated nature.
A more recent and powerful alternative is Playwright, developed by Microsoft (and “inspired” by Puppeteer”). Playwright has rapidly gained traction due to its ability to automate multiple browsers, including Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Like Puppeteer, even Playwring, as a stand-alone software, can be easily detected by anti-bot solutions and needs some additional layers of software to be invisible.
In response to the increasing difficulty of evading bot detection, the Python community has developed specialized solutions such as undetected-chromedriver, a modification of the standard Selenium WebDriver that bypasses many common anti-bot measures.
Another emerging solution is Botasaurus, a relatively new framework designed to be stealthier than traditional browser automation tools. According to its creators, Botasaurus is more effective than popular libraries like undetected-chromedriver and Puppeteer-Stealth, offering a streamlined way to automate browsing while avoiding detection.
Despite the power of these open-source alternatives, many scrapers still run into challenges when dealing with sophisticated bot-detection systems that employ advanced fingerprinting techniques. This has led to the rise of anti-detect browsers, which provide an extra layer of anonymity for automated browsing.
Understanding Anti-Detect Browsers
While open-source automation tools can be effective, they still leave behind a digital fingerprint that websites can analyze to differentiate between bots and real users. Since browsers expose the underlying hardware and software configuration, using Playwright on a server instead of a consumer-grade device like a laptop raises several red flags. In fact, target websites (and anti-bots installed on their systems) can easily see that there’s no monitor and GPU, no sound and video devices, and other hints that make clear that a bot is using a browser instead of a human.
This is where anti-detect browsers come into play. Unlike traditional browsers, which expose various attributes that can be used to track and identify users, anti-detect browsers are designed to mask these characteristics, making it appear as if multiple unique users are browsing from different environments.
Anti-detect browsers modify key elements such as the User-Agent, WebGL Renderer, Audio and Video device enumeration, and WebRTC settings, ensuring that each browsing session appears unique. They also usually have different user profiles to connect to, which save the browser history and cookies for that user, making anti-detect browsers particularly valuable for use cases such as multi-account management, ad verification, social media automation, and, of course, web scraping.
Well-known anti-detect browsers
We have discussed anti-detect browsers in past articles of The Web Scraping Club and will continue to do so in the future. If you’re curious to know more about them, here’s a small and noncomplete list of the most well-known solutions on the market, in alphabetical order, with an overview of their prices.
Dolphin{Anty}: starts from free with 10 browser profiles and then from 10 USD for 60 profiles and API for browser automation.
GoLogin: starts from 49 USD per month with 100 profiles to use, API for Playwright, and 1 Cloud profile you can use on GoLogin infrastructure instead of your own.
Incogniton: you need the 29 USD per month profile to get 50 profiles and APIs
Kameleo: 29 EUR plan for unlimited profiles and APIs for your browser automation framework
More Login: You can start for free with 2 profiles and APIs, and then prices range from 9 USD for 10 profiles to 160 USD a month for 1000 profiles.
MultiLogin: 79 EUR per month with 100 browser profiles and APIs, plus 5GB of proxies.
NSTBrowser: You can start from free with 10 profiles and 10 hours of usage, then prices start from 29.9 USD
Octo Browser: starts from 79 EUR per month for getting 100 profiles and API access
Undetectable.io: 49 USD per month for unlimited browser profile, 50 cloud profiles and APIs
These prices are for monthly plans and were taken on February 7th, 2025. The prices of annual subscriptions may differ.
As you can see, one pricing factor is the number of profiles you get in the package: the more profiles you get, the more concurrency you can create by launching multiple instances of the anti-detect browser, each with a different profile. The bottleneck of this solution is that, except in the cases where you have cloud profiles, you need to manage the infrastructure where the browser is running. In fact, your Playwright/Puppeteer clients will need to connect to a browser instance, in the same machine or in a remote one, and the more clients you need, the more machines for running browser instances you’ll need to spawn.
This is why they’re great at performing small-to-medium scraping and automation tasks but are challenging to use on larger scopes.
So what are the alternatives? If we don’t need browser interaction, we can switch to Unblocker APIs. These APIs connect to browserless scrapers like a proxy and handle all the magic in the background, returning the HTML of the target page.
However, managed browsers are the solution we're looking for if we need to fill out forms, click buttons, and interact with the target pages.
Managed Browsers and Their Growing Importance
While anti-detect browsers focus on masking identity, managed browsers take a different approach. These solutions are designed specifically for large-scale web scraping and offer built-in proxy management, CAPTCHA solving, and automatic fingerprint rotation. Unlike anti-detect browsers, which require users to configure their own settings, managed browsers handle everything under the hood, providing a plug-and-play experience for developers and businesses.
Well known Managed Browsers
The market for managed browsers is rapidly evolving, so I’m sure the following list is incomplete. Please let me know if you know of any solutions that are missing.
Bright Data Scraping Browser: This managed browser solution leverages Bright Data's experience in unblocking web extractions. It’s paid per GB, starting at 8.4 USD and lowering for higher volumes. I just saw that there’s an active promotion on the website where Bright Data doubles the money you put on your account, so it seems like a good day to start using it.
Browserbase: stealth browser for your automation with plans starting from 39 USD per month with three concurrent browsers and 2 GB of proxies included.
Browserless: start from free with no concurrency to 500 USD per month for 50 concurrent executions. It handles CAPTCHA solving and other anti-detect measures for bypassing anti-bot solutions.
Browser Scrape: in this case, the pricing is different, you pay per GB of traffic, starting from 10 USD, CAPTCHA solving and unblocking capabilities included.
Browser Use: starts from free for the self-hosted solution to 30 USD per month for the hosted version, but I don’t see on the website any anti-detect feature.
Hyperbrowser: You can start free with five concurrent browsers and pay 100 USD per month for 100 concurrent executions. In this case, stealth mode and CAPTCHA solving are included.
Lightpanda: You can start by self-hosting the open-source solution and asking for an API Key for the managed one. This product's unique selling point is its efficiency and speed rather than stealth mode. As Katie mentioned in a previous post, they created a new browser designed for building AI agents rather than for humans.
Rebrowser: starting from 49 USD per month, with five persistent profiles, one concurrent browser session, and three concurrent scraper requests.
I definitely forgot some of the players, so please feel free to contact me at pier@thewebscraping.club so I can integrate the list.
Conclusion: The Future of Browser Automation
The browser automation landscape has never been more dynamic. Open-source tools like Playwright and Puppeteer continue to be widely used, but they require additional modifications to remain effective against modern bot-detection systems. Anti-detect browsers provide a higher level of anonymity but demand careful configuration, while managed browsers offer convenience at the cost of control.
What’s the approach you like more? Did you try something else? Please let me know in the comment section on our Discord server.
Can't wait til you try Sequentum Pierluigi! I know we have a different approach than all these components you mention - we are point and click rather than 100% raw code and open source libraries you have to orchestrate, but we have the industrial scale you would expect from a company that has operated for government agencies and large financial institutions for 17 years (!), a fully custom stealth browser with powerful anti-bot defenses, fully integrated browser/parser capabilities so no need to farm out work across the internet to load a full browser here and there, built-in capability to generate unlimited unique device or tsl fingerprints so no need to lease those from third parties, powerful browser automation, built-in apis customizable to each 'agent'....the list goes on and on.... it's the all-in-one platform that gets the data you need. In fact web scraping experts can build their own unblocker apis on top of our platform affordably and make a business out of it without having to stand up all the proxy and server architecture and code to run their own platform.
I love this landscape overview. I just wanted to add a couple of note to it:
-The reason why anti-detect browsers can be so powerful in terms of bypassing anti-bot systems is that we ship custom-built browsers. It means we modify the browser's c++ code to ensure they maintain the human behavior even when automated.
-Readers should also know that anti-detect browsers were originally designed to manage multiple online accounts (manually). It took years until the pioneers (including us at Kameleo) decided to support actions over an API and that was the moment when the most innovative web-scrapers realized how powerful an anti-detect browser can be for their project. If you check the pricing model of most of the anti-detect browsers you notice the same that Pier said. They are based on the number of profiles they can manage. However in my opinion this is irrelevant from the perspective of web-scraping. We believe that until this moment we are the only anti-detect browser who has a pricing model and dedication towards web-scrapers, as we provide unlimited number profiles to manage and our API is the fastest.