Anchor Browser alternative? humanbrowser is self-serve, transparent, and open-source.

Two products, two go-to-markets

Anchor Browser is a New-York-based cloud-browser company, $6M seed in early 2026, founded by Unit 8200 alumni, and one of the launch partners for Cloudflare's Web Bot Auth program. The product is real and the team is strong. The motion is enterprise: a $0 free tier capped at 5 credits, then a Talk-to-Expert form for anything past that, and the named-account playbook Cloudflare partnerships imply.

humanbrowser is the opposite shape on every axis except the underlying engineering problem. Same job — give an AI agent a cloud browser that can execute user-authorized tasks on real websites with a clean residential connection. Different go-to-market: self-serve, public pricing, open-source core, public benchmarks.

None of that is criticism of Anchor's strategy — enterprise sales is a legitimate playbook for infrastructure with a high integration cost. It is criticism of misallocation. If you are an AI-agent shop, a YC team, or a developer who wants to ship something this afternoon, the enterprise-sales motion is friction you should not have to swallow.

What humanbrowser ships, line by line

Why CUA + DOM hybrid matters

Most cloud-browser products execute through DOM selectors only — find element, click element, type into element. That works for 80% of websites. The other 20% — heavy canvas surfaces, drag-and-drop interfaces, complex shadow DOM, pages that actively detect synthetic CDP input — is exactly where AI agents fall over.

humanbrowser ships a real Computer-Use-Agent backend (xdotool + scrot driving Xvfb, fronted by our in-house Computer-Use model) for those targets. Our public MVP test on example.com landed at 25.8s end-to-end, 5 steps, $0.044 cost. Because the CUA path uses real human-input primitives (no CDP, no JS hooks injected into the page) it is also resilient to the WebDriver-style detection that trips up DOM-only stacks. WebDriver=missing/passed on bot.sannysoft.com on the same MVP run.

Per-domain rules in our knowledge base decide automatically whether a site goes through CUA or the cheap DOM path. You do not pick the backend — the system does, based on what worked last time.

Pricing — humanbrowser publishes everything, Anchor publishes "Talk to Expert"

This is not a gotcha. Enterprise vendors hide pricing because the deal shape varies per account — multi-year commits, custom SLAs, dedicated capacity. That math makes sense for large procurement. It does not make sense for a developer or a 4-person AI shop that wants to budget a project in an afternoon. The simple answer is: pick the vendor whose pricing-disclosure posture matches your stage.

Public benchmarks — the engineering-honesty difference

Anchor publishes no equivalent benchmark. You take the marketing claims on trust, or you build your own test rig and run both. We did the second step in public so you do not have to.

When Anchor Browser is the better choice

This page exists to help you make a real decision, not to win every comparison. Anchor wins these:

• Cloudflare Web Bot Auth as a contractual deliverable. If your enterprise contract requires the Cloudflare partner-program logo on day one — for example, the buyer wants the cryptographic-passport handshake named in the SOW — Anchor is one of the launch partners and ships it today. We have it on the near-term roadmap (the A2A endpoint already exposes an agent identity, so the handshake is incremental) but if "today" matters more than "soon", choose Anchor.
• Unit 8200 / Israeli-cybersecurity network deals. The founders have relationships and brand recognition inside that ecosystem. If your buying process is being routed through that network, Anchor's relationships beat ours. Choose them then.
• You explicitly want an enterprise sales relationship. Dedicated CSM, named SLA, custom integration support, multi-year commit pricing. That is a legitimate procurement shape and Anchor is built for it. We are not — we are built for self-serve.
• Your security review will reject any vendor without a public SOC 2 attestation today. Procurement gates that hard-block on the SOC 2 logo close one specific door. Talk to us about compliance needs; for everyone else, our bundle ships in production today.

When humanbrowser is the better choice

• You are an AI-agent shop, indie dev, or YC-stage team. You want to start in 5 minutes, see the bill before signing anything, and bring the agent live the same hour.
• You want the code on GitHub. Open-source core, npm package, the whole runner readable. Verify, fork, contribute.
• You want CUA for the hard sites and cheap DOM for the rest, auto-routed. No config flag flipping — the system learns per domain from the 277+ trajectory corpus and picks the right backend.
• You are building A2A-first. Your agent already speaks Agent2Agent — humanbrowser is reachable as another agent rather than as infrastructure you wire up.
• You want public benchmarks you can re-run. 6×12 stealth engines, LLM cost-per-task — all OSS, no vendor scoring its own homework.
• You want a live viewer and one-click human takeover as a first-class workflow. Free on every session. Built for user-authorized tasks where a human stays in the loop.

Migration: Anchor to humanbrowser in 30 minutes

If you already have an Anchor-driven script, migration is one integration swap. POST your task spec to https://agent.humanbrowser.cloud/a2a — navigate, click, extract, log in, export. humanbrowser plans and executes it inside a session with a clean residential connection, the right execution backend (CUA or DOM, auto-routed), and the live viewer attached. You stop wiring proxy configs separately, you stop calling fallback solvers as a side-channel. Try it for $1, smoke-test one representative flow, then cut your highest-friction script over first.

Code: Anchor session API vs humanbrowser A2A

import { Anchor } from '@anchorbrowser/sdk';

const anchor = new Anchor({ apiKey: process.env.ANCHOR_KEY });
const session = await anchor.sessions.create({
  // Pricing per minute / GB / solve negotiated
  // after Talk-to-Expert conversation.
  region: 'us-east'
});

const page = await session.openPage('https://target.com/login');
await page.type('#email', process.env.USER_EMAIL);
await page.type('#password', process.env.USER_PASS);
await page.click('button[type=submit]');
// ...your DOM-by-DOM logic...

const res = await fetch('https://agent.humanbrowser.cloud/a2a', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + process.env.HB_TOKEN
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    jsonrpc: '2.0',
    id: 'login-1',
    method: 'tasks/send',
    params: {
      skill: 'login_and_extract',
      message: 'Log in to target.com and export CSV',
      country: 'gb',
      profile: 'reports-bot'
    }
  })
});
const { result } = await res.json();
// Residential connection, auto-routed backend,
// live viewer attached, result.artifacts has the CSV.

Left side: a DOM-by-DOM script you maintain forever. Right side: declare the goal, hand off the execution. When the site updates and a selector breaks, the A2A version re-plans; the DOM version pages you at 3am.

FAQ