AI agents now use the web the way people do. Since OpenAI shipped an agent that drives its own browser, teams have moved from collecting pages to building agents that sign in, fill forms and finish tasks, and the browsers underneath have to keep up.
Solari and Bright Data both host browsers you drive with Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium, but they are built for different jobs. Choose Solari when your agents need fast sessions, logins that persist, and sandboxes or desktops on the same account. Choose Bright Data when the job is collecting public web data at volume through its proxy network.
Why Does the Choice Matter Now?
Web scraping grew up around one pattern: load a public page, take the data, move on. Bright Data built a large business on that pattern, and in 2024 a federal court sided with it on logged-off scraping of public data.
Agents work differently. An agent books, files, updates and buys inside accounts, often across dozens of steps, and it may need to run code on what it finds. That changes what you ask of a browser provider: how fast a session starts, whether a login survives between runs, and what the agent can do besides browse.
How Do Solari and Bright Data Compare on Speed?
Solari publishes a measured session start, shown in the table above; Bright Data publishes a task benchmark instead. On Steel's open-source benchmark, Solari averaged 199.9 ms end to end across 5,000 runs, from session create to release. The pull request with that result is open, so you can rerun it yourself.
Bright Data says its Browser API ranked first among eight remote browser providers in an AIMultiple benchmark of real-world scraping tasks. The two results answer different questions: Solari's is how quickly your agent gets a working browser, Bright Data's is how a scraping task finishes on the sites AIMultiple chose.
For an agent that opens a fresh browser per task, start time adds up. Across thousands of tasks a day, sessions that are ready in milliseconds keep your agent working instead of waiting.
How Do Solari and Bright Data Compare on Price?
They bill on different bases. Solari charges per browser hour, so you pay for the time a session runs. Bright Data says it bills its Browser API per GB of traffic, with proxies, CAPTCHA solving and unblocking included, and its pricing runs from a free tier with monthly credits and included traffic, to pay as you go with no monthly commitment, to a monthly Scale plan and custom Enterprise contracts.
Solari bills browsers at $0.10 per browser hour on Starter, $0.07 on Professional and $0.05 on Team, and the Free plan costs $0 a month with $3 of monthly credits. Proxy traffic on stealth sessions costs $4 to $6 per GB and CAPTCHA solving $0.005 to $0.01 per solve, depending on the plan.
Per-GB billing grows with page weight, so an agent that loads image-heavy pages pays for every megabyte. Per-hour billing grows with time, so a default Solari browser costs the same whatever the page weighs. An agent that idles between light pages while a model thinks can come out cheaper per GB; an agent that moves quickly through heavy pages comes out cheaper per hour. On proxied Solari sessions, one setting blocks video and large images so they never cross the proxy.
What Is Each Built For?
Bright Data is built for web data collection. Its Browser API sits in a suite with Web Unlocker, a Web Scraper API and ready-made datasets, and Bright Data designed it for JavaScript-heavy sites, unpredictable anti-bot behaviour and teams without their own proxy infrastructure. Its trade-off is scope: it is a browser for collecting data, so running agent code or a full desktop means a second vendor.
Solari is built for agents, with browsers, sandboxes and desktops behind one API. These are the jobs Solari handles for you:
Keep a login between runs. 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.
Get through sites that block bots. Turn on stealth for sites with bot defenses, route traffic through a residential, static ISP or mobile proxy in the country you choose, and let Solari solve any CAPTCHA that appears. Give several sessions the same proxy label and they share one exit IP, so multi-step logins stop tripping security checks.
Run a whole list at once. With Solari you can launch up to 100,000 browser sessions at once, so you can run every task on a list in one pass instead of queuing it overnight. Existing Playwright and Puppeteer code connects by changing the connection URL.
See what the agent did. Record a session and replay it in the console, or download it as a line-by-line log. Whoever reviews the agent's work sees exactly what it saw and clicked.
Browsers are only part of the job. Solari sandboxes run the code your agent writes, and Solari desktops give computer-use models a full screen to operate, all on one account, one API key and one bill.
Bright Data is the more established vendor, with a large proxy network and data catalogue behind its browser; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price.
Where Are Browser Agents Going Next?
From pages to accounts. More agent work happens behind a login, so a saved session becomes as basic as the browser itself.
From reading to doing. Agents will submit, book and update, and every action needs a record a person can check.
Browsers plus code. Agents will gather data in a browser and process it in a sandbox in the same run.
Screens as well as pages. Models with computer use already operate software through a screen, so agents will reach apps that never shipped an API.
What stays human is judgment: which sites an agent may act on, what it may submit under your name, and the review of what it did.
Get Started With Solari
Choose Solari over Bright Data when your agents need sessions that start fast, logins that persist, and sandboxes or desktops on the same account. Stay with Bright Data when the job is collecting public data at volume and its per-GB, proxy-included pricing fits your traffic.
Start with one job, such as a signed-in agent that checks the same dashboard every morning, then scale to the full list once it runs cleanly. 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.
