Compare the Top Headless Browsers as of April 2025

What are Headless Browsers?

A headless browser is a web browser that operates without a graphical user interface (GUI), allowing tasks to be performed programmatically instead of through direct user interaction. It processes web pages, including rendering and executing JavaScript, just like a standard browser but works entirely in the background. This makes it a valuable tool for tasks such as web scraping, automated testing, and performance analysis. By running without a visual interface, headless browsers are faster and more resource-efficient than traditional browsers. They are widely used in automation workflows to interact with and analyze web content seamlessly. Compare and read user reviews of the best Headless Browsers currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    NetNut

    NetNut

    NetNut

    Get ready to experience unmatched control and insights with our user-friendly dashboard tailored to your needs. Monitor and adjust your proxies with just a few clicks. Track your usage and performance with detailed statistics. Our team is devoted to providing customers with proxy solutions tailored for each particular use case. Based on your objectives, a dedicated account manager will allocate fully optimized proxy pools and assist you throughout the proxy configuration process. NetNut’s architecture is unique in its ability to provide residential IPs with one-hop ISP connectivity. Our residential proxy network transparently performs load balancing to connect you to the destination URL, ensuring complete anonymity and high speed.
    Starting Price: $1.59/GB
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  • 2
    Google Chrome
    Connect to the world on the browser built by Google. Google builds powerful tools that help you connect, play, work and get things done. And all of it works on Chrome. With Google apps like Gmail, Google Pay, and Google Assistant, Chrome can help you stay productive and get more out of your browser.
  • 3
    Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox is a free, open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to internet health and privacy. Designed to prioritize user privacy and security, Firefox offers features like Total Cookie Protection, which provides outstanding privacy by default. The browser includes tools such as Firefox View, allowing users to see tabs open on other devices and access recent history, and built-in PDF editing capabilities, enabling form edits directly within the browser. Available across various platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, Firefox ensures a consistent and secure browsing experience. Its commitment to user-centric development and transparency makes it a preferred choice for those seeking a trustworthy alternative to proprietary browsers.
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    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    Steel.dev

    Steel.dev

    Steel.dev

    ​Steel is an open source browser API that lets you control fleets of browsers in the cloud. From large-scale scrape jobs to fully autonomous web agents, Steel makes it easy to run browser automation in the cloud. Spin up on-demand browser sessions with a simple API call. Built-in CAPTCHA solving that keeps your automation flowing. Simple controls to never worry about getting flagged as a bot again. The average session starts in less than 1s when the client is in the same region. Run for a minute or several hours, each session can run up to 24 hours. Save and inject cookies and local storage to pick up where you left off. Easily run your Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium in the cloud. Session Viewer lets you view and debug live or recorded sessions.
    Starting Price: $99 per month
  • 5
    Bright Data

    Bright Data

    Bright Data

    Bright Data is the world's #1 web data, proxies, & data scraping solutions platform. Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions and small businesses all rely on Bright Data's products, network and solutions to retrieve crucial public web data in the most efficient, reliable and flexible manner, so they can research, monitor, analyze data and make better informed decisions. Bright Data is used worldwide by 20,000+ customers in nearly every industry. Its products range from no-code data solutions utilized by business owners, to a robust proxy and scraping infrastructure used by developers and IT professionals. Bright Data products stand out because they provide a cost-effective way to perform fast and stable public web data collection at scale, effortless conversion of unstructured data into structured data and superior customer experience, while being fully transparent and compliant.
    Starting Price: $0.066/GB
  • 6
    browserless

    browserless

    browserless

    Browser automation built for enterprises, loved by developers. Fast, scalable, and reliable browser automation. Make headless automation your competitive advantage. Integrate with one-line of code in puppeteer and playwright. Or use Selenium. Don't feel like writing code to do screenshots? Use our REST APIs to do they heavy lifting. Increase your app's performance by not having to manage Chrome or other browsers. Our smallest plan lets you run 10 browsers at once! Sessions can run as long as you want, and even keep the browser open indefinitely. Stop trying to get Chrome running in lambda, or fonts rendering properly and just use browserless. Your account page shows crucial information like sessions and queues plus includes email notifications. browserless takes care of all the dependencies, sand-boxing, and management of the web browser. You can connect remotely and automate it with open-source libraries, using our pre-built REST APIs, or write and run your own functions.
    Starting Price: $10
  • 7
    Puppeteer

    Puppeteer

    Puppeteer

    Most things that you can do manually in the browser can be done using Puppeteer! Puppeteer-core is intended to be a lightweight version of Puppeteer for launching an existing browser installation or for connecting to a remote one. Be sure that the version of puppeteer-core you install is compatible with the browser you intend to connect to. Puppeteer will be familiar to people using other browser testing frameworks. You create an instance of Browser, open pages, and then manipulate them with Puppeteer's API. By default, Puppeteer downloads and uses a specific version of Chromium so its API is guaranteed to work out of the box. To use Puppeteer with a different version of Chrome or Chromium, pass in the executable's path when creating a Browser instance.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 8
    Playwright

    Playwright

    Playwright

    Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed. Playwright waits for elements to be actionable prior to performing actions. It also has a rich set of introspection events. The combination of the two eliminates the need for artificial timeouts - the primary cause of flaky tests. Playwright assertions are created specifically for the dynamic web. Checks are automatically retried until the necessary conditions are met. Configure test retry strategy, capture execution trace, videos, screenshots to eliminate flakes. Browsers run web content belonging to different origins in different processes. Playwright is aligned with the modern browsers architecture and runs tests out-of-process. This makes Playwright free of the typical in-process test runner limitations.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 9
    ScrapingBee

    ScrapingBee

    ScrapingBee

    We manage thousands of headless instances using the latest Chrome version. Focus on extracting the data you need, and not dealing with concurrent headless browsers that will eat up all your RAM and CPU. Thanks to our large proxy pool, you can bypass rate limiting website, lower the chance to get blocked and hide your bots! ScrapingBee web scraping API works great for general web scraping tasks like real estate scraping, price-monitoring, extracting reviews without getting blocked. documentation. If you need to click, scroll, wait for some elements to appear or just run some custom JavaScript code on the website you want to scrape, check our JS scenario feature. If coding is not your thing, you can leverage our Make integration to create custom web scraping engines without writing a single line of code!
    Starting Price: $49 per month
  • 10
    HasData

    HasData

    HasData

    Get valuable data at scale in HTML format from any website without the need for a proxy. If you're tired of fiddling with proxies, headless browsers, and captchas, it's time to use HasData (formerly Scrape-It.Cloud). Send the desired URL and we'll return an HTML response. Work without headaches and worries about blocking. We use Chrome browser in headless mode so that your website displays exactly as it does in a real browser. You don't need to pass additional headers to the web scraping API. Focus on parsing the code - we'll take care of the data aggregation. Javascript affects what the user actually sees on the site. We output Javascript with a simple parameter to scrape any site, even single-page applications using React, AngularJS, Ajax, Vue.js, or other libraries. With a large proxy pool, you can bypass site speed limits, hide your scrapers, and reduce the chance of being blocked. We offer data center and residential proxies. Just choose your type of proxy, and we'll do the rest.
    Starting Price: $30 per month
  • 11
    Kameleo

    Kameleo

    Kameleo

    Kameleo for Multi-Account Management Kameleo antidetect browser lets you securely manage multiple social media accounts and e-commerce accounts (like Amazon, eBay, TikTok, Meta, and Google Ads) from a single computer. Each account stays distinct with unique browser fingerprints. Our revolutionary masking engine mimics real user behavior, so you can focus on growing your business without worrying about account bans. It also supports team collaboration, cloud storage, and profile sharing options between team members. This makes it easy to collaborate, manage multiple accounts together, and stay organized. Kameleo for Web Scraping Kameleo provides a powerful antidetect browser for better data collection on websites with anti-bot detection systems. It combines headless browsers, built-in proxies, and top-tier automation framework support for smooth web scraping. You can run it on your own infrastructure for more control and performance.
    Starting Price: €59 per user per month
  • 12
    Latenode

    Latenode

    Latenode

    Latenode offers no-code simplicity, full-code power, and AI intelligence. Build and automate interactions between any services that have APIs. Use no-code nodes, or write your own code. Instead of spending time searching for the necessary API and going through the documentation, simply voice your request to the AI assistant and receive ready-made code. Latenode is a powerful data platform designed to simplify the integration of various marketing tools. It provides an integrated system that eliminates data discrepancies and enhances operational efficiency through seamless integration. Ready-made connectors for popular SaaS services or custom code for complete freedom. Send a Slack notification to your team and an email confirmation to the client. Use conditional logic to route your scripts based on incoming data. Use a cloud-based API building kit to create workflows that connect any applications.
    Starting Price: $17 per month
  • 13
    Stagehand

    Stagehand

    Stagehand

    Stagehand is an AI-driven web browsing framework that enhances Playwright's capabilities, enabling developers to automate browsers using natural language instructions. Built by Browserbase, it introduces three intuitive APIs, act, extract, and observe, on top of Playwright's base page class, facilitating web automation through straightforward commands. For instance, developers can navigate to a webpage, identify elements like search bars, extract specific data such as product prices, and perform actions like adding items to a cart, all through natural language directives. This approach simplifies the creation of durable, self-healing, and repeatable web automation workflows, reducing the complexity and fragility often associated with traditional methods. Stagehand is fully compatible with existing Playwright code, allowing for seamless integration into current projects. By leveraging AI, it offers a more intuitive and efficient way to handle browser automation tasks.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 14
    PhantomJS

    PhantomJS

    PhantomJS

    PhantomJS is a headless web browser scriptable with JavaScript, running on Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. Utilizing QtWebKit as its back-end, it offers fast and native support for various web standards, including DOM handling, CSS selectors, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. This makes it an optimal solution for tasks such as page automation, screen capture, headless website testing, and network monitoring. For example, a simple script can load a webpage and capture it as an image.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 15
    HtmlUnit

    HtmlUnit

    HtmlUnit

    HtmlUnit is a "GUI-Less browser for Java programs" that models HTML documents and provides an API to interact with web pages, such as invoking pages, filling out forms, and clicking links, similar to a standard web browser. It offers fairly good JavaScript support, which is constantly improving and is capable of handling complex AJAX libraries, simulating browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or Edge depending on the configuration used. Typically used for testing purposes or retrieving information from websites, HtmlUnit is not a generic unit testing framework but is intended to simulate a browser within another testing framework such as JUnit or TestNG. It is utilized as the underlying "browser" by various open source tools like WebDriver, Arquillian Drone, and Serenity BDD, and is employed by many projects for automated web testing, including Apache Shiro, Apache Struts, and Quarkus.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 16
    trifleJS

    trifleJS

    trifleJS

    TrifleJS is a headless browser designed for test automation, utilizing the .NET WebBrowser class and the V8 JavaScript engine to emulate Internet Explorer environments. Its API is modeled after PhantomJS, making it familiar to users of that framework. TrifleJS supports various versions of Internet Explorer, allowing emulation of IE7, IE8, and IE9, depending on the installed version. Developers can execute scripts via the command line, specifying the desired IE version for emulation. The platform offers an interactive mode (REPL) for debugging and testing JavaScript code.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 17
    SlimerJS

    SlimerJS

    SlimerJS

    SlimerJS is a free, open source scriptable browser for web developers, allowing interaction with web pages through external JavaScript scripts. It enables tasks such as opening web pages, clicking links, and modifying content, making it useful for functional tests, page automation, network monitoring, screen capture, and web scraping. Unlike PhantomJS, SlimerJS runs on top of Gecko, the browser engine of Mozilla Firefox, instead of WebKit, and can operate in both headless and non-headless modes. APIs of SlimerJS are similar to the APIs of PhantomJS but there are a few differences in their behavior. However, most of the scripts for PhantomJS run perfectly well with SlimerJS right now.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 18
    ScrapFly

    ScrapFly

    ScrapFly

    Scrapfly offers a suite of APIs designed to streamline web data collection for developers. Their web scraping API enables efficient extraction of web pages, handling challenges like anti-scraping measures and JavaScript rendering. The Extraction API utilizes AI and large language models to parse documents and extract structured data, while the screenshot API allows for capturing high-quality visuals of web pages. These tools are built to scale, ensuring reliability and performance as data needs grow. Scrapfly also provides comprehensive documentation, SDKs in Python and TypeScript, and integrations with platforms like Zapier and Make to facilitate seamless integration into various workflows.
    Starting Price: $30 per month
  • 19
    Jaunt

    Jaunt

    Jaunt

    Jaunt is a Java library designed for web scraping, web automation, and JSON querying. It provides a fast, ultra-light headless browser that enables Java programs to perform tasks such as web scraping, form handling, and interfacing with REST APIs. Jaunt supports parsing of HTML, XHTML, XML, and JSON, and offers features like HTTP header and cookie manipulation, proxy support, and customizable caching. The library does not support JavaScript execution; however, for automating JavaScript-enabled browsers, Jauntium is recommended. Jaunt is available under the Apache License, with a monthly edition that expires periodically, requiring users to download the latest version upon expiration. The library is suitable for tasks such as parsing and extracting data from web pages, filling out and submitting forms, and handling HTTP requests and responses. Comprehensive tutorials and documentation are available to assist users in getting started with Jaunt.
  • 20
    Browserbase

    Browserbase

    Browserbase

    Headless browsers that work everywhere, every time. Control fleets of stealth browsers to build reliable browser automation. Focus on your code with autoscaled browser instances, and best-in-class stealth features. Run hundreds of browsers with powerful resources to power uninterrupted long-running sessions. Work with headless browsers as you do with your browser with live access, replay, and full tools featuring logs and networks. Build and run undetectable automation with configurable fingerprinting, automatic captcha solving, and proxies. The best AI agents are built with Browserbase, navigating the most complex web pages, undetected. With a few lines of code, enable your AI agent to interact with any web pages, undetected and at scale. At any time, leverage the live session view feature to let humans help in completing complex tasks. Leverage Browserbase’s infrastructure to power your web scraping, automation, and LLM applications.
    Starting Price: $39 per month
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