AI agents now do real work on the open web, and investors call web AI agents the next frontier of automation. Every one of those agents needs a cloud browser under it, and the vendor you pick decides how fast each job starts and how the bill is counted.
Solari and Anchor Browser both give an agent a cloud headless browser. Solari is the faster infrastructure layer, billed by the browser hour, with sandboxes and desktops on the same account; Anchor packages the task itself, billed per completed task, with managed logins on top. This guide compares speed, price and fit, and says which team each one suits.
Why Does the Browser Layer Matter Now?
A browser agent that runs once a day can live on a laptop. A fleet that runs all day across thousands of accounts can't, so the browser vendor moves from a detail to a line on the monthly bill.
Teams used to run a self-hosted Chromium cluster and patch it by hand. Now a browser starts by API, takes the agent's commands and is released when the job ends, so the choice comes down to three things you can check: how fast a session starts, what an hour or a task costs, and how many browsers run at once.
What Is Each Built For?
Solari expects you to bring the agent logic and gives it a fast place to run; Anchor builds and runs the workflow for you.
Solari
Core capabilities. Solari is agent infrastructure: cloud browsers, AI sandboxes and computer desktops from one account and one API. Solari browsers are ready in 8 ms, take Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP and are released when the job ends. Every session option is opt-in, so you switch on stealth, proxies, recording and a saved login per session.
Where it fits. Solari suits a team that writes its own agent and wants the layer under it fast and cheap. Platform engineers who run browser agents in production get speed numbers they can rerun, and teams whose agents also run code or drive a desktop keep one bill.
Trade-off. Solari gives you the environment and leaves the agent logic to you. A team that wants plain-language tasks turned into workflows for it gets more from Anchor's layer.
Anchor Browser
Core capabilities. Anchor runs cloud browsers with sessions over CDP or REST, natural-language web tasks, managed authentication, recordings, batch sessions and stealth browsing. Anchor says it uses AI agents to plan deterministic browser tasks, falling back to AI at runtime only when a step needs it, and its Enterprise plan scales to 500+ concurrent browsers.
Where it fits. Anchor suits a team that wants to describe a task in plain language and get a repeatable workflow back, with logins handled by OmniConnect, its authentication layer for computer-use agents. Bring-your-own-cloud and on-premise deployment matter to companies that cannot send sessions to a shared cloud.
Trade-off. Anchor bills by completed task, so cost tracks how many jobs finish rather than how long a browser stays open. That suits a fixed list of workflows and is harder to forecast for an open-ended agent whose tasks vary in length.
Which Is Faster, Solari or Anchor Browser?
Solari is faster. On Steel's open-source benchmark, Solari averaged 199.9 ms end to end across 5,000 runs, about 40x faster than Anchor on the same run; the results sit in an open pull request you can rerun yourself.
Start-up time compounds, because a fleet pays it on every job. For a task that opens a page, reads it and closes it, a fast start decides whether your agent answers while a person waits or sits in a queue. Anchor frames its own speed at the task level, against agents that drive a browser step by step, rather than as a session start time.
How Does Pricing Compare?
Solari bills browser time by the hour; Anchor bills credits per completed task. The two count different things, so the honest comparison is plan by plan.
Solari's Starter plan runs 20 concurrent browsers at $0.10 per browser hour, and Professional runs 150 concurrent browsers at $0.07 per browser hour. Each plan's monthly fee comes back as the same amount in usage credits, so you pay for browser time, and the hourly rate falls as you move up.
Anchor's plans cap Starter at up to 25 concurrent browsers and Team at up to 50, and Growth runs $2,000 a month for up to 200, with each completed task costing 0.1 credits and overage at $1.00 per credit. A team sizing for Anchor Growth's concurrency compares it against Solari Professional.
Anti-bot work is priced differently too. Anchor includes automated captcha bypass from Starter, and its Growth plan adds Anchor Chromium, a stealth fork of Chromium. Solari includes stealth mode on every paid plan, and prices proxies at $4.00 per GB and captcha solving at $0.005 per solve on Professional.
What Can You Run on Solari?
Most production browser jobs are short, repeated and often behind a login. These are the jobs teams move to Solari first:
Signed-in portal work. Your agent signs in to a supplier or partner portal, downloads the report and closes the tab. A saved login reopens on every later run, so the agent never signs in twice.
Research across a full list. Your agent opens one browser per account and works the whole list in parallel. Each session starts fast, so the list finishes while you wait instead of overnight.
Agent code next to the browser. Your agent writes a script, runs it in a sandbox and checks the result on a live page. Both run under one API key, so there is no second vendor to wire in.
Runs a person can audit. Your agent's session is recorded and replayed later, so whoever approves its output sees exactly what it did. Recording captures input values by default, so leave it off for sessions that type a secret.
What Role Does Solari Play?
Solari is the environment your agent runs in; the agent and its logic stay yours. Solari runs browsers, sandboxes and desktops from one API, and each capability below serves a job above.
A Solari profile saves a session's cookies and site data, so your agent signs in once and every later session opens already signed in. Profiles use Playwright's storage state format, so a login you already have uploads as is.
With Solari stealth on, you can route a session through a residential, static ISP or mobile IP in the country you choose, and keep the same IP across sessions for flows that challenge a changing address.
With Solari you can record any session and replay it in the console, or download it as a line-by-line log of what happened on the page.
Solari works with Playwright, Puppeteer and any client that speaks CDP, so moving an existing agent over means changing where it connects.
Where Are Browser Agents Going Next?
Today most browser agents run one task at a time. Over the next year that changes in four ways:
Agents will work whole lists every morning without a person starting them, and start-up time will matter on every run.
Saved, editable logins will become a standard part of the browser layer rather than code each team writes.
Models with computer use already operate a full desktop, so agents will move between a browser, a terminal and desktop apps in one job.
Teams will compare vendors on what a finished job costs at volume, not on a demo.
What stays human is judgment: which jobs to hand to agents, what leaves under your company's name, and the relationship once a customer replies.
Solari or Anchor Browser: Which Should You Choose?
Solari leads on session speed and on hourly billing that gets cheaper as you grow; Anchor packages the task and the login on top of the browser. Choose Solari when the agent logic is already yours and speed, hourly cost and concurrency drive the bill, or when the same agent needs sandboxes and desktops behind one API.
Stay with Anchor when plain-language tasks, managed logins through OmniConnect and per-task pricing are why you picked it. Anchor is the broader bundle for managed web tasks; Solari is the younger, focused infrastructure layer and moves faster on speed and price.
Get Started With Solari
Start with the job that runs most often: point its Playwright code at a Solari session, attach a profile for its login and time a week of runs. Solari is the fastest and cheapest way to run cloud browsers and VMs for web agents. Get started with a free account and start running your agents today.
