Browser Forest vs Browserbase: A Real-World Comparison

Browserbase is the best-known name in "browser infrastructure for AI agents". It deserves the reputation: clean API, generous free tier, solid tooling. But when you benchmark the two side by side on real anti-bot-protected sites — not lab detectors — the underlying browser engine decides the outcome. This post shares our head-to-head results.

Methodology

Fairness was the point, so we controlled everything we could:

• Same sites, tested in the same window with the same network conditions.
• Same residential proxy provider for both platforms — so IP reputation was identical and neither platform could blame the other's network.
• N=3 runs per site per platform, to smooth out transient failures.
• Images blocked over CDP on both sides to keep transfer comparable.

Sites were chosen to span the anti-bot spectrum: no protection (Kickstarter, Booking), Cloudflare (Indeed), and DataDome (Etsy).

Results: 4 sites, 3 runs each

The difference shows up exactly where it matters: on Cloudflare. Browser Forest passed all three runs on Indeed; Browserbase got stopped by Cloudflare's Security Check (an interstitial challenge page) on two of its three attempts. On unprotected sites both products work fine — which is why lab demos always look good. The value of an anti-detection engine only shows on protected sites.

What the Etsy result actually means

Both platforms were blocked on Etsy, but with different error codes (1543 vs 4001). This is the important nuance: Etsy's DataDome deployment was blocking at the IP reputation layer — the residential proxy pool itself was flagged. When the network is the problem, no browser engine can help; the request never reaches a state where JavaScript fingerprints matter. We deliberately report this failure instead of hiding it, because it's the real shape of the anti-bot landscape: some blocks are engine problems, some are network problems, and honest benchmarks say which is which.

Beyond scraping: captcha and CDP control

Two more dimensions from our broader benchmark suite (run against Browserless, Steel, Hyperbrowser and Browserbase as well):

Captcha handling on the free tier

Browser Forest was the only platform in the test that handled captcha challenges automatically on its free tier (via its CapSolver-backed integration).

CDP command coverage

We tested 20 CDP domains/commands — Target, Browser, Runtime, Page, Network, Fetch, Input, DOM, CSS and more:

Full CDP coverage matters for agent workloads: modern agent frameworks reach for browser contexts, system info, and fine-grained input APIs. Getting blocked on Target.getBrowserContexts breaks multi-profile agent patterns.

Why the difference?

Both products route requests through real Chrome instances. The difference is what happens inside the engine when automation attaches. Browserbase layers fingerprint configuration on top of stock Chromium. Browser Forest patches Chromium and V8 at the source: the automation flag is removed from Blink, CDP input events are cleaned of debugger markers, injected scripts are anonymized in Error.stack, and object serialization is hardened in V8. When Cloudflare runs its checks, it's not catching a fingerprint — there is no fingerprint left to catch.

We respect what Browserbase has built; on unprotected sites you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart. But if your workload involves Cloudflare-, DataDome- or Akamai-protected targets — and most real-world data worth collecting is — the engine is the product. That's the whole reason we built our own.

Try Browser Forest free — no credit card, 300 browser-minutes — and run the same benchmark against your own hardest target.