Comparison
Browser Use gives your code an agent that drives a browser it launches. Browsentic gives you a side panel that drives the browser you are already signed in to. One is for software you are building, the other for work you are doing. Here is where each one wins.
Different owners
A library that gives your code a browser agent
A side panel that drives the browser you are signed in to
Side by side
Checked against the browser-use repository and browser-use.com, September 2026. Their product moves; when this drifts, an issue is the fastest fix.
| Browsentic | Browser Use | |
|---|---|---|
| The shape of it | ||
| What it is | A browser extension with a side panel, plus a local daemon | A package you import and write code against |
| How you drive it | Say or type it in the panel | Write a script and run it |
| The browser | Your real, open, logged-in tab | A Chromium it launches, or one in its cloud |
| Logins | Already yours: nothing is re-authenticated | You supply cookies or stored state, or sign in each run |
| Model keys | None: it spawns the CLI you signed in to | You bring an API key, and pay per token |
| What it costs | Nothing beyond the agent subscription you already have | Free to self host, plus tokens; cloud browsers metered by the minute |
| License | MIT | Open source, on GitHub |
| What it is for | ||
| Interactive work | The point: you watch it on a timeline and approve as it goes | Possible, but you are writing code to do it |
| Many runs in parallel | Several tabs and agents in one browser, on one machine | The point: fan out across cloud browsers |
| Headless and CI | No: it needs your real browser open | Yes, and that is the normal way to run it |
| Proxies and CAPTCHA | No: it is your browser, on your connection | Yes, in the cloud tier |
| Composing into your own software | Through MCP, or not at all | Yes: it is a library |
| Trust | ||
| Credentials | Sealed into placeholders; the agent never sees plaintext | Whatever your script passes it |
| Approvals | A declarative policy, every rule tunable, per-site grants | Yours to implement |
| Where page text goes | To the agent on your machine, marked untrusted | To whichever model API you configured |
| Show it a job once | Recordings: do it yourself, later say “do it like last time” | Write the script |
No equivalent over there
Nothing is re-authenticated in a throwaway profile, so the banks, the intranets and the single sign-on that would stop a fresh Chromium never come up. You are already past the login wall.
The gap between wanting a job done and having it done is one sentence in the panel. There is no agent to construct, no model to choose in code, and nothing to deploy.
It spawns the CLI you already subscribe to, so a long job costs what your existing plan costs. There is no API key anywhere in the product.
Form submission, file upload and leaving the run’s sites pause in the panel and name themselves, which matters a great deal more when the browser is the one holding your real accounts.
Record a job yourself and replay it later, or point it at a site and let it map itself. Both become skills you read before you arm them.
If you do want this in your own tooling, the daemon speaks MCP over stdio, so Claude Code, Cursor or Zed can drive the paired tab without you writing a client.
Credit where it is due
A comparison you cannot lose is not a comparison. These are real, and some of them are why some people should pick their product over ours.
Hundreds of browsers in parallel, headless, in CI, behind proxies. Browsentic drives exactly one browser: the one in front of you, and only while it is open.
That means it composes into your own software: your control flow, your retries, your storage. Browsentic is an application, and the panel is the interface.
Browser Use pairs the DOM with screenshots so it can find a control that has no usable markup. Browsentic leans on a layout diagram with stable selectors, and takes screenshots when asked.
Browsers by the minute, with residential proxies and CAPTCHA solving, so a scraping job is somebody else’s infrastructure problem. Browsentic has no hosted anything.
The short version
Pick Browser Use if you are building software that automates the web: many runs, headless, in CI, at a scale no person is sitting in front of.
Pick Browsentic if the work is yours and the accounts are yours: one browser, already signed in, driven from a panel you talk to, with approvals in front of anything that commits.
They do not overlap much. A team can reasonably run Browser Use in its pipelines and Browsentic on the laptops, and neither one gets in the other’s way.
Free and MIT licensed. No signup, no key to paste, and a fresh install connects to nothing until you pair it yourself.
npx browsentic setup