Local Browser Agents vs. Hosted Browser Automation — When Each Makes Sense

Two very different tools are both called "browser automation" right now: local browser agents (Selenium, Playwright, Claude Code's browser tools, new open-source agent frameworks) and hosted browser automation APIs. They solve different problems, and conflating them leads to the wrong tool for the job.

What local agents are good at

Local browser agents run in your current environment, with access to your existing authenticated sessions. They're excellent for:

• One-off tasks — "log into my dashboard and export this report"
• Personal automation — filling forms, scraping data you're already logged into
• Interactive sessions — tasks that require back-and-forth decisions as pages load
• Local dev testing — clicking through your app running on localhost

The strength is context: local agents see what you see, inherit your cookies, and can interact with anything your browser can reach. The limitation is that they're ephemeral — the session ends, the output lives wherever you saved it, and rerunning requires the same local setup.

Where hosted automation wins

Hosted browser automation runs on remote infrastructure. That changes the use case profile significantly:

Recording and shareable output. A narrated video of a browser session requires a browser, a recording layer, and an audio pipeline. Running that reliably on CI infrastructure — on every PR, every release, every Monday morning — means the recording needs to be infrastructure, not a local process.

const res = await fetch('https://api.pagebolt.dev/v1/video', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'x-api-key': process.env.PAGEBOLT_API_KEY, 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    steps: [
      { action: 'navigate', url: process.env.PREVIEW_URL, note: 'Open the preview' },
      { action: 'click', selector: '#key-feature', note: 'Demonstrate the feature' }
    ],
    audioGuide: { enabled: true, script: "Here's what's new. {{1}} This is the feature. {{2}}" },
    pace: 'slow'
  })
});
fs.writeFileSync('demo.mp4', Buffer.from(await res.arrayBuffer()));

Repeatability. A step sequence is a file in your repo. It runs the same way every time, on any machine, without local setup. Local agents depend on the local environment — browser version, installed extensions, cached state.

CI/CD integration. GitHub Actions can't run your local browser agent. A hosted API call works anywhere fetch works.

Cross-origin capture. Hosted automation can navigate to any URL, authenticated or not, without inheriting your local session state. Useful for monitoring competitor pages, capturing public URLs at scale, or generating screenshots of sites you don't have accounts on.

The decision split

The tools aren't in competition — they're in different parts of the stack. Local agents handle the interactive, session-aware, decision-making layer. Hosted automation handles the recording, repeatability, and output-generation layer.

Try it free — 100 requests/month, no credit card. → pagebolt.dev