The short version
- Choose Browserbase if your agent has to act in a browser: sign in, click through flows, fill forms or work with dynamic interfaces.
- Choose SarvCrawl if you need the content of whole sites and documents as clean markdown, chunked, embedded and searchable.
SarvCrawl and Browserbase, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Browserbase | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Hosted headless browsers for agents and automation |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | Agent workflows that need a real browser |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Whatever you script; Fetch API returns HTML, JSON or markdown |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Yes, real browser instances |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Not a documented focus |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Not offered; has a web search API |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Proxies and CAPTCHA solving on paid plans; advanced stealth on Scale |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | Free: 1 browser-hour; Developer $20/mo for 100 hours |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted browsers; the Stagehand SDK is MIT open source |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | Stagehand (TypeScript, Python, Go), MCP server, CLI |
Where they really differ
Browserbase is browser infrastructure: you get real, hosted browser sessions with live view and replay, and drive them yourself or through Stagehand, its open-source SDK for AI-driven browsing. That is the right tool when the job involves a login, a form or a multi-step flow.
It is not a site crawler. You script the navigation, or fetch one URL at a time, and pricing follows browser-hours. Turning what you collect into a searchable corpus is your build.
SarvCrawl handles the content side: one crawl call follows links across a public site, parses linked documents, and lands everything in a knowledge base an agent can search.
Using both
A common agent setup: Browserbase for the steps that need a browser session, and SarvCrawl as the agent's searchable memory of docs and reference sites, both available as MCP servers.
SarvCrawl vs Browserbase: questions
Is SarvCrawl a Browserbase alternative?
Only for reading public content. If your agent needs to sign in, click or fill forms, Browserbase is the tool, and the two work well side by side.
Does Browserbase crawl websites?
It gives you browsers to script, plus a Fetch API for single URLs. Following links across a site is up to your code.
How is Browserbase priced?
By browser-hours. The free plan includes 1 hour, and the Developer plan is $20 a month for 100 hours, with proxies on paid plans.
Can an agent use both through MCP?
Yes. Browserbase has an MCP server for browser control, and SarvCrawl has 21 MCP tools for crawling and searching knowledge bases.