Browserless vs AgentFetch — which is better for agents?

Browserless wins when you need real browser execution; AgentFetch wins for everything else in the agent use case. Browserless rents headless Chrome instances over an HTTP/WebSocket API, starting around $50/mo for a single concurrent browser, scaling to $200-$500/mo for production capacity. It's the right tool for JS-heavy SPAs (modern Notion, Linear, Figma, post-render React apps), interaction-required scraping (click "Load more", fill a form, scroll-to-load), screenshots, and PDF generation from web pages. AgentFetch handles ~85% of agent web-fetch workloads (static HTML, server-rendered React/Next.js, news sites, docs, GitHub, Wikipedia, arXiv) at 1/10 the cost and with native MCP integration — one config line in Claude Desktop or Cursor vs a Playwright session per fetch. For agent runtimes specifically, Browserless isn't MCP-native; you write your own MCP wrapper or call the HTTP API from tool code. A practical hybrid: install AgentFetch as your default fetch tool, fall back to a self-hosted Playwright/Browserless container for the specific domains that require JS. AgentFetch surfaces clear error codes (js_required, anti_bot_detected) when this fallback is needed, so the agent can choose which tool to invoke per URL.