Thanks for the comprehensive overview - great read as always!
Just wanted to chime in with something I recently heard second-hand: apparently, several companies listed here as web unblocker providers are planning to shut down or significantly scale back their web unblocker offerings. Has anyone else heard similar news?
From what I gather, the main reason seems to be the increasing difficulty of bypassing modern anti-bot systems. It’s becoming so complex that only BaaS platforms and Anti-Detect Browsers can keep up. And in the cases I heard about, the unblocker product isn't their core business, so it’s hard for them to justify the growing investment.
Also, it's worth noting that at least one of the providers on this list actually uses our anti-detect browser under the hood when dealing with the toughest anti-bot protections - and in recent weeks, they’ve been rapidly scaling up their usage.
Regarding the BaaS category: on paper, running a real browser in the cloud and applying spoofing mechanisms might seem straightforward. But it’s not that simple. For example, there are CDP-level detection techniques (https://kameleo.io/blog/bypass-runtime-enable-with-kameleos-undetectable-browser). To truly maximize the success rate against these detection methods, the only viable solution we found at Kameleo - after years of development - was to ship two custom-built browsers (Chroma and Junglefox) dedicated for web-scraping. We’ve been focused on browser fingerprint spoofing since 2017, so I feel confident saying that anti-detect browsers can outperform many of the BaaS tools listed, especially when it comes to high-stakes targets like finance or travel sites. In fact, we’ve already benchmarked Kameleo against some of these platforms, and our tool performed significantly better in several real-world use cases. Would anyone be interested in a more detailed comparison?
Finally, I completely agree that integrating with these platforms is easier and faster. But for teams running scraping ops at scale and able to manage infrastructure in-house, anti-detect browsers can save a lot in operational costs - both in pricing and in reliability.
Thanks for the comprehensive overview - great read as always!
Just wanted to chime in with something I recently heard second-hand: apparently, several companies listed here as web unblocker providers are planning to shut down or significantly scale back their web unblocker offerings. Has anyone else heard similar news?
From what I gather, the main reason seems to be the increasing difficulty of bypassing modern anti-bot systems. It’s becoming so complex that only BaaS platforms and Anti-Detect Browsers can keep up. And in the cases I heard about, the unblocker product isn't their core business, so it’s hard for them to justify the growing investment.
Also, it's worth noting that at least one of the providers on this list actually uses our anti-detect browser under the hood when dealing with the toughest anti-bot protections - and in recent weeks, they’ve been rapidly scaling up their usage.
Regarding the BaaS category: on paper, running a real browser in the cloud and applying spoofing mechanisms might seem straightforward. But it’s not that simple. For example, there are CDP-level detection techniques (https://kameleo.io/blog/bypass-runtime-enable-with-kameleos-undetectable-browser). To truly maximize the success rate against these detection methods, the only viable solution we found at Kameleo - after years of development - was to ship two custom-built browsers (Chroma and Junglefox) dedicated for web-scraping. We’ve been focused on browser fingerprint spoofing since 2017, so I feel confident saying that anti-detect browsers can outperform many of the BaaS tools listed, especially when it comes to high-stakes targets like finance or travel sites. In fact, we’ve already benchmarked Kameleo against some of these platforms, and our tool performed significantly better in several real-world use cases. Would anyone be interested in a more detailed comparison?
Finally, I completely agree that integrating with these platforms is easier and faster. But for teams running scraping ops at scale and able to manage infrastructure in-house, anti-detect browsers can save a lot in operational costs - both in pricing and in reliability.
Looking forward to hearing others' experiences!