16MB vs 1.2GB — Benchmarking 5 AI Browser Automation Tools

I was using Claude Code for browser automation and found myself stuck choosing between tools. There are five candidates, each with a completely different approach. I installed all of them and ran 10 tests — turns out the best choice depends entirely on your use case. TL;DR: For auth management, go with playwright-CLI. For an agent operation backbone, agent-browser. For autonomous natural-language control, browser-use. For high-volume crawling, Lightpanda. For production infrastructure, steel-browser. This article focuses on CLI-mode comparisons. Some tools like browser-use shine brightest in LLM agent mode — I plan to cover that angle in a separate post. The 5 Tools Compared Tool Stars Language License Maintained by In a nutshell playwright-cli 6.1K (+85K core) TypeScript Apache-2.0 Microsoft CLI strong on auth management and token efficiency agent-browser 24.1K Rust Apache-2.0 Vercel CLI purpose-built for agent development browser-use 82.2K Python MIT browser-use LLM autonomously oper