# Airtop vs Playwright MCP (slim)

> Playwright MCP scores 67.6 (B) on agent readiness against Airtop's 55.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Airtop leads on reliability and schema & documentation. Both do browser automation. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-playwright-mcp.md (~2,400 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-playwright-mcp.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/airtop-vs-playwright-mcp
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Playwright MCP scores 67.6 (B) on agent readiness against Airtop's 55.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Airtop leads on reliability and schema & documentation. Both do browser automation.

- Airtop: C 55.3, rank #511 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/airtop.min.md
- Playwright MCP: B 67.6, rank #203 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/playwright-mcp.min.md
- Airtop, good for Agents that need a hosted browser with natural-language page calls, saved logins handed over by a person, and proxies and CAPTCHA solving in one service. Ahead on Reliability, 69 against 57; Schema & documentation, 76 against 70. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- Playwright MCP, good for The default choice for an agent that drives web pages by structure rather than pixels. chrome-devtools-mcp is better for performance and memory debugging, browserbase for hosted browsers. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 84 against 65; Security & auth, 57 against 46; Payments & pricing, 60 against 25; Maintenance & community, 84 against 24; Transparency & trust, 72 against 61. Also No key needed to call it; Runs on your own machine; Open source.

| Category | Airtop | Playwright MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 69 | 57 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 76 | 70 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 65 | 84 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 46 | 57 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 24 | 84 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 61 | 72 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Airtop | Playwright MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | Switchboard Visual Technologies, Inc. (dba Airtop) | Microsoft |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.airtop.ai/api` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy) |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| Licence | Proprietary cloud service under Airtop's terms of use. The Node and Python SDKs are MIT per npm and PyPI | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 72 |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.microsoft/playwright-mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-07-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-07-29 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-09-02 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes |  |
| Popularity | 16 stars, 16k npm/wk, 246 PyPI/wk | 37k stars, 5.3M npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |