Notte vs Browserbase: pricing, credentials, and what's behind the paywall
A side-by-side look at Browserbase and Notte: pricing tables, feature gating, credential handling, and where each platform is stronger. Numbers as of May 2026.
Browserbase is the most established cloud browser in the AI agent space. $40M Series B, partnerships with Cloudflare and Ramp, Stagehand as a first-party agent SDK, broad Playwright/Puppeteer compatibility. If you need managed Chromium in the cloud, Browserbase is probably on your shortlist already.
The differences show up in how each platform handles credentials, what's gated behind paid tiers, and what it costs at scale.
Credentials
The first thing that separates these two is what happens when your workflow needs to log in.
Browserbase recently shipped Identity with three pieces: Web Bot Auth (cryptographic proof of agent identity), a 1Password integration for accessing existing credential vaults, and the Contexts API for persisting authenticated sessions across runs. If you already store credentials in 1Password, this gives you a real path to log in and stay logged in across sessions.
Notte takes a different approach. You store credentials in a Notte vault. When the agent encounters a login form, it emits a placeholder. The platform substitutes the actual secret at the browser action layer, inside the session. The credential never enters the LLM's context window.
Browserbase's approach works well if you already have a 1Password setup and want to reuse existing accounts. Notte's approach keeps secrets out of the LLM context entirely and doesn't require a particular password manager. Neither is strictly better; it depends on your existing tooling.
Sign-up flows
What if the workflow needs to create an account, not just log into one?
Browserbase's Identity feature is built around existing accounts: authenticating, persisting sessions, reusing credentials. It doesn't provision new identities with real email inboxes or phone numbers for verification flows.
Notte personas are managed identities with real inboxes and phone numbers. The agent signs up, the verification email arrives at the persona's inbox, the platform reads the code and feeds it into the session. The agent never sees the raw credential or verification code.
Most teams don't need this on day one. But when you do, building it yourself is a deeper project than it looks: email hosting, phone provisioning, verification code parsing, session coordination.
Pricing
With those feature differences in mind, here's what the two platforms actually cost. All prices from public pricing pages as of May 2026.
| Notte | Browserbase | |
|---|---|---|
| Browser time | $0.05/hr | $0.10–$0.12/hr (varies by plan) |
| Billing granularity | Per minute, 1-min minimum | Per minute, 1-min minimum |
| Free tier | 100 hrs lifetime, 5 concurrent | 1 hr, 3 concurrent, 15-min session cap |
| Entry paid tier | Developer $20/mo, 100 hrs/mo | Developer $20/mo, 100 hrs, $0.12/hr overage |
| Mid tier | Startup $100/mo, 500 hrs/mo | Startup $99/mo, 500 hrs, $0.10/hr overage |
| Residential proxies | $10/GB, all paid tiers | $10–12/GB overage, Developer+ |
| Stealth | Basic on Developer, Advanced on Startup | Basic on Developer/Startup, Advanced on Scale (custom) |
| CAPTCHA solving | Paid tiers | Developer+ |
| Session replays | All tiers | All paid tiers |
| Vaults / credentials | All tiers | Developer+ (1Password integration) |
The base plan prices are close ($20/mo vs $20/mo at the entry tier). The gap is in overage rates: $0.05/hr vs $0.10–$0.12/hr. At prototype scale, that's a few dollars a month. At thousands of sessions a day, it's a real line item.
Browserbase's free tier is effectively a sandbox: a 15-minute session cap with no stealth, no proxies, and no CAPTCHA solving. You can evaluate the API, but not test anything resembling a production workflow. Notte's free tier (100 hours lifetime, 5 concurrent) gives more room to experiment, though stealth isn't available until the Developer tier on either platform.
Stealth is tiered on both platforms, but differently. On Browserbase, Developer and Startup get basic stealth. Advanced stealth (a purpose-built Chromium with fingerprints that bot-protection partners like Cloudflare recognize via Signed Agents) is on Scale, which is custom pricing. On Notte, Advanced stealth is on Startup ($100/mo), one tier lower than Browserbase's equivalent.
Source: Browserbase pricing, Notte pricing
Where Browserbase wins
Framework compatibility is Browserbase's clearest advantage. Stagehand (their own SDK), Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, Mastra, LangChain, CrewAI. If you're building with one of those, Browserbase drops in with minimal friction. Notte's integration surface is narrower.
Browserbase has $40M in funding and partnerships with Cloudflare and Ramp. If your procurement team weighs vendor stability, or you need enterprise SLAs from a well-capitalized company, that matters in ways that a pricing table doesn't capture.
The Model Gateway for LLM cost pass-through is useful if you're routing model calls through their stack.
Replay infrastructure, live view, session persistence, and serverless functions exist on both platforms at this point.
When to use which
Browserbase if you want broad framework compatibility, already have credential handling sorted (especially via 1Password), or need the SLA commitments and vendor backing of a well-funded company.
Notte if you prefer a credit-based model where credits apply across all platform features, your workflows involve logins or sign-up flows, or you want vault and persona features built into the platform rather than assembled from separate tools.
The differences are workload-specific, not sweeping. Both platforms work. Pick based on which gaps matter for your use case.
Performance note: On the public Browser Arena leaderboard (open-source, 100 sequential runs per provider, May 2026), Notte ranks #1 by composite score (0.904) and Browserbase ranks #4 (0.781). Browser Arena is maintained by Notte Labs but is open-source and reproducible. ComputeSDK publishes a second open methodology that includes Browserbase.