The best anti-detect browsers, and who each one is for

Start by working out which product you are buying

"Anti-detect browser" covers two things that share almost no engineering. Get this split right and the shortlist writes itself.

Six tools, ordered by how literally they fit the term

This is not a preference ranking. It runs from the products that are anti-detect browsers in the strict sense down to the ones buyers switch to once they realise they never needed a browser. Wayfern sits fourth because that is where it honestly falls on that axis.

1. 01

   Multilogin

   A desktop anti-detect browser built around many isolated profiles, each with its own fingerprint, proxy and cookie jar, automated through Selenium, Puppeteer or Playwright over a remote WebDriver, a CLI, or the Postman-documented API.

   Best for Teams of humans operating many long-lived logged-in accounts, where per-vector fingerprint control and cookie tooling matter more than concurrency.

2. 02

   Browserbase

   A managed cloud browser platform with published quickstarts for Playwright, Puppeteer and Selenium, contexts that persist cookies and storage between sessions, browsers in four regions, and a Verified tier running a purpose-built Chromium with real browser fingerprints.

   Best for Prototyping on a $0 tier and growing into region-pinned browsers with managed proxies across a stated 201 countries.

3. 03

   Browserless

   Cloud browsers reachable three ways — a WebSocket for existing Puppeteer and Playwright code, stateless REST endpoints, and BrowserQL, a GraphQL API its docs call "a stealth-first browser automation tool" — across Chromium, Chrome, a stealth build, Firefox, WebKit and Edge.

   Best for Work that needs a non-Chromium engine, or a declarative captcha and anti-bot API instead of hand-written waits.

4. 04

   Wayfern

   A CDP gateway: connect Playwright or Puppeteer to a fingerprinted cloud browser over one WebSocket, choose the residential exit down to city and ISP in the connection string, and pay from a single credit balance shared with the scrape, search and captcha APIs.

   Best for Long logged-in flows that must hold one browser identity and one exit IP from sign-in through checkout, driven entirely by code.

5. 05

   Bright Data

   Not an anti-detect browser, and does not claim to be: its documentation presents anti-detect browsers as third-party tools you plug its proxies into, and lists 31 of them as integration targets, alongside residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile networks, managed unblocking APIs and a hosted Browser API.

   Best for Supplying geo-targeted IPs — country, US state, city, ZIP or ASN on residential — to whichever browser you already chose.

6. 06

   Firecrawl

   Also not a browser: a context API that turns pages into markdown or schema-shaped JSON, with scrape, crawl, map, search, interact and batch endpoints, per-plan rate limits published rather than hidden, and a self-hosting guide in the repository.

   Best for Pipelines with no login and no clicking, where an anti-detect browser is an expensive way to fetch HTML.

Multilogin X against a hosted CDP fleet, row by row

The right-hand column is Multilogin X throughout — the most thoroughly documented product in the strict category, and the fairest single stand-in for the desktop model. Every cell in it was read from Multilogin’s own pages; where they publish no figure, the cell says so instead of guessing.

The fingerprint is the easy half

A request/response API discards its state between calls; a held CDP session keeps one identity — fingerprint, cookies, exit IP — for the whole run.

A fingerprint that passes the check on page one is worth nothing if the cookie jar, the local storage and the exit IP change by page four. That axis is what the category is actually arranged along, and it is why a request/response scraping API can never be an anti-detect browser however good its unblocking is: every call is independent by construction, so whatever made the last one plausible is already gone.

Wayfern sits on the held-session side. The session is created when the CDP socket opens — there is no REST endpoint to start one and nothing to poll — and the same browser, the same cookie jar and, when you ask for one, the same sticky residential exit stay yours until you close it. The pool only hands an instance back to connections carrying the same link token, the same workload and the same exit, so a browser is never reused across tokens or geos.

Where the competition is straightforwardly ahead: Wayfern keeps nothing once the socket closes. Browserbase Contexts persist the Chromium user data directory between sessions — cookies, localStorage, IndexedDB, session storage, service workers, form autofill and browser preferences — and Browserless authenticated profiles restore cookies, localStorage and IndexedDB on any launch that passes ?profile=, within a 2 MB and 50-origin cap. If the workflow is "log in once in March, still be logged in in June", both of those do something Wayfern does not.

Four meters, and the one your workload runs down first

Nobody here charges the same way, which makes list prices almost useless side by side. What matters is which meter your work consumes fastest.

Per profile and seat (Multilogin). Tiers are sized by how many profiles you keep, not by how long anything runs: a free-forever tier with 5 cloud profiles, Pro 10, Pro 50 and Pro 100 at $11, $29 and $40 a month, and Business on a slider from 300 to 10,000 profiles between $89 and $900 a month, with annual billing advertised at 35% off. Cheap when you hold a few hundred accounts and a person drives them; entirely unrelated to how many browser-hours you burn.

Per browser-hour and per unit (Browserbase, Browserless). Browserbase publishes Free at $0 with 3 concurrent browsers and 1 browser hour, Developer at $20 with 25 concurrent and 100 browser hours then $0.12 an hour, Startup at $99 with 100 concurrent and 500 hours then $0.10 an hour, and Scale on request. Browserless publishes annually-billed Prototyping at $25 for 20,000 units, Starter at $140 for 180,000 and Scale at $350 for 500,000, with overages of $0.0020, $0.0017 and $0.0015 per unit. Read the ceilings as carefully as the rates: Browserbase returns HTTP 429 past your concurrency limit and the docs state the request "was effectively dropped", and Browserless caps a single session at 15, 30 or 60 minutes by tier.

Per successful request (ScrapingBee, Firecrawl, Bright Data’s unblocking APIs). ScrapingBee publishes an explicit credit table — 1 credit for a rotating proxy without JavaScript, up to 75 for stealth with JavaScript — and its Auto-Mode climbs from the cheapest configuration that works, bills only the tier that succeeded, and bills 0 when every configuration fails. Firecrawl is 1 credit per page for scrape, crawl and map. Bright Data bills only successful requests by default on Web Unlocker, although enabling custom headers or cookies switches it to billing 100% of requests, failures included. This is the cheapest meter in the category, right up until you need to click something.

Per credit, from one balance (Wayfern). An open page costs 8 credits an hour with a 60-second minimum per page, residential egress is 320 credits per GB metered per byte as it is consumed, and datacenter egress is free. The same balance pays for the Web Data API — scrape is 1 credit per page — plus search and captcha solves, so discovery and interaction never need two contracts. Plans run Developer at $19 for 1,520 credits and 20 concurrent sessions, Business at $99 for 9,000 and 100, and Scale at $499 for 46,000 and 400, with 20% off yearly and non-expiring packs of 1,000 / 5,000 / 20,000 credits at $12.50 / $55 / $200. The honest caveat: there is no free tier. The cheapest way in is $19 a month, where Browserbase, Browserless and Firecrawl all publish a $0 one.

Moving an existing script onto a hosted browser

If your automation already drives Chromium locally, or through Multilogin’s remote WebDriver, the move to a hosted fleet is one changed line — the connect call — followed by one real decision about where state lives. Everything after connectOverCDP is the Playwright you already wrote.

Identity is the part that is not a one-liner. A profile manager keeps a profile directory around between runs; Wayfern does not, so anything that used to be implied by "the profile is still signed in" has to become an explicit step: sign in at the top of the run, or hold the socket open for the whole flow. Add session= and the sign-in on step one and the checkout on step six are seen from the same residential IP.

import { chromium } from "playwright";

// The session is created when this socket opens — no REST call, nothing to poll.
// country / region / city / isp choose the residential exit; session= holds one
// IP for the run. Omit them all and you get the free datacenter exit.
const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP(
  "wss://browser.wayfern.com/ws?token=<LINK_TOKEN>&country=US&region=CA&session=run42",
);

const page = await browser.contexts()[0].newPage();
await page.goto("https://example.com/login");
// ...ordinary Playwright from here: fill, click, waitForSelector.

await browser.close();

Questions buyers ask once the demo is over