Bright Data alternatives when you need the browser, not the proxy

Where Bright Data is still the right answer

Most people reading an "alternatives" page do not actually need to move. Here is the split, stated as plainly as we can make it.

A session you hold open, or a request someone else runs

Bright Data’s unblocking products take a request and hand back a result. Wayfern hands you the browser and gets out of the way.

Web Unlocker is a request in, a result out: it manages IP rotation, browser fingerprints, sessions and CAPTCHA solving for you, and can force JavaScript rendering, return markdown, or return a PNG. That is genuinely less code to own — but the state between two calls is theirs, not yours, and you cannot reach into the page between them.

Wayfern inverts that. `wss://browser.wayfern.com/ws?token=…` is a Chrome DevTools Protocol endpoint; the session exists for exactly as long as your socket stays open. The gateway sets no fixed session ceiling and no per-domain restriction — a run ends when you disconnect, when your credits run out, or when the link’s concurrency cap refuses a new connection. Cookies, storage and the applied fingerprint stay put across every navigation in between.

The identity is not bolted on afterwards either. The browser exposes a `Wayfern.getFingerprint` / `refreshFingerprint` / `setFingerprint` CDP domain that the platform drives to generate and pin a per-target Windows, macOS or Linux identity, and the same anti-detect browsers back the Web Data endpoints. The trade is real: you own the automation logic that Bright Data would have run for you.

Line by line, with the sources under each claim

Bright Data cells come from their documentation and are listed in Sources at the bottom of this page. Where their docs do not say, this table says so instead of guessing.

Two different meters: successful requests vs one credit balance

The shape of the bill matters more than the headline rate, and only one of these two rates is published.

Bright Data’s unblocking products bill for outcomes. The SERP API is priced per 1,000 successful requests with parsing, proxy management and unlocking included and no separate bandwidth fee, and neither it nor Web Unlocker bills failed requests under default settings. That is a genuinely good deal when unblocking is hard, and it is worth knowing the exception: switching on custom headers or cookies flips both products to billing 100% of requests, successful or not. Their docs also document a free tier — 5,000 credits a month, stated as a "~$7.50 value", covering Web Unlocker, SERP API, Web Scraper API and Scraper Studio, renewing on the 1st and not rolling over, plus a $2 one-time trial credit for the proxy and Browser API products.

We are not going to put a per-GB Bright Data number next to ours, because we could not read one from a first-party page while writing this. Third-party figures circulate and contradict each other. Check their pricing page directly and compare it against the rates below.

Wayfern meters one balance across everything. Browser sessions cost 8 credits per open-page hour, accrued per second with a 60-second minimum bill per page. Residential egress is pay-as-you-go at 320 credits/GB, metered per byte by a sidecar that samples every 5 seconds and terminates a session that can no longer pay; sessions without location parameters take the datacenter exit, whose egress costs nothing. The Web Data endpoints are per unit — 1 credit per scraped page, 1 credit per uncached source page, 5 credits per capture — and a captcha solve is 1 credit on success.

Plans are self-serve and the credits are the same currency for all of it: Developer at $19/mo for 1,520 credits and 20 concurrent sessions, Business at $99/mo for 9,000 credits and 100 concurrent sessions, Scale at $499/mo for 46,000 credits and 400 concurrent sessions. Credit packs roll over; plan grants do not.

Moving a Playwright script off the Browser API

Both are CDP endpoints, so the connection line is the only thing that really changes. What changes conceptually is where the exit is configured: Bright Data encodes targeting in the proxy username with flags like -country-xx, -city-xxxxx and -session-xxxxxx; Wayfern puts it in the query string of the connection itself, and the choice applies for the life of that session.

The other thing that changes is what you are allowed to do next. A Browser API session is one domain and at most 60 minutes; the second navigation below — to a different host, on the same session, with the same cookies and the same applied fingerprint — is the reason people move.

import { chromium } from 'playwright';

// Before — Bright Data Browser API: a hosted CDP endpoint, one domain per
// session, 60 minutes maximum, 5 idle minutes before it times out.
// const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(BRIGHTDATA_CDP_ENDPOINT);

// After — Wayfern: the same connectOverCDP call against a link token.
// Exit geo is connection state, not a username flag. session=<id> holds
// one residential IP for the whole run.
const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(
  'wss://browser.wayfern.com/ws' +
    '?token=<LINK_TOKEN>&country=US&region=CA&city=<CITY>&session=run42'
);

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com/login');
// ...log in, solve whatever needs solving...

// Same session, different host. Cookies, storage and the applied
// fingerprint all survive the hop.
await page.goto('https://partner.example.net/reports');

await browser.close(); // billing stops when the socket closes

Questions people actually ask before switching