Browserbase

Headless browser as a service. Spin up real Chromium browsers via API, drive them with Playwright/Puppeteer, get full session recordings. Useful when a target site requires JS rendering, user interaction, or session state that simple HTTP fetches can't handle.

Capabilities

Authentication

• Type: API Key
• Header: x-bb-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY
• Get key: https://www.browserbase.com/settings
• Env vars: BROWSERBASE_API_KEY, BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID
• Base URL: https://api.browserbase.com

Core Operations

Create a browser session

POST https://api.browserbase.com/v1/sessions
x-bb-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY

{
  "projectId": "YOUR_PROJECT_ID"
}

Returns a session ID and a WebSocket URL (connectUrl) you connect to with Playwright or Puppeteer.

Connect with Playwright (Node)

import { chromium } from 'playwright-core';
import { Browserbase } from '@browserbasehq/sdk';

const bb = new Browserbase({ apiKey: process.env.BROWSERBASE_API_KEY });
const session = await bb.sessions.create({ projectId: process.env.BROWSERBASE_PROJECT_ID });

const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(session.connectUrl);
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://joescoffeeshop.com');
const html = await page.content();
const title = await page.title();
await browser.close();

List session recordings

GET https://api.browserbase.com/v1/sessions/{sessionId}/logs

Useful for debugging when a scrape doesn't return what you expected — session recordings show exactly what the browser saw.

Stagehand (high-level AI-friendly wrapper)

Browserbase ships Stagehand, a Playwright wrapper with act(), extract(), and observe() methods that take natural-language instructions instead of CSS selectors. Stagehand also publishes an MCP server.

import { Stagehand } from '@browserbasehq/stagehand';

const stagehand = new Stagehand({ env: 'BROWSERBASE' });
await stagehand.init();
await stagehand.page.goto('https://joescoffeeshop.com');

const contact = await stagehand.page.extract({
  instruction: "Extract the business phone number, email, and street address",
  schema: { phone: 'string', email: 'string', address: 'string' }
});

When to Use (over Firecrawl)

• Site requires user interaction (cookie consent, age gate, click-through before content loads)
• Form submission to access a quote/contact page
• Session state matters (logged-in tools, multi-step flows)
• Complex JS rendering that even Firecrawl's headless option struggles with
• Want full session recordings for audit/debugging
• AI-driven scraping via Stagehand's natural-language extraction

For simple "scrape a page as markdown," Firecrawl is lower-overhead. Use Browserbase when you actually need the browser-as-a-service model.

When NOT to Use

Same hard rules as Firecrawl. Browserbase gives you a more powerful browser, which means the temptation to bypass anti-scraping defenses is higher. Don't:

• ✗ Bulk-scrape Google Maps / search results, LinkedIn, Yelp, or any platform whose ToS forbids it
• ✗ Bypass CAPTCHAs, login walls, or bot protections
• ✗ Auto-fill forms on platforms you don't have an account or legitimate access to

Use Browserbase for: individual public business sites the user has a URL for, where rendering or interaction is required.

Pricing

• Free tier: limited monthly minutes
• Paid tiers scale by browser minutes + concurrency
• Confirm at https://www.browserbase.com/pricing

Relevant Skills

• prospecting (programmatic site visits for prospect enrichment)
• competitor-profiling (when competitor sites need rendering or interaction)
• cro (page audits that need real browser state)
• analytics (testing tracking implementations end-to-end)