Airtop vs Selenium

Airtop

The cloud browser API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 document, Markdown docs, natural-language page calls with a per-call credit cap, and a status page with no incident in the last 90 days. Credit rates for browser time, proxy traffic and AI calls are not published, and the developer changelog's last entry is dated 3 September 2025.

Selenium

Selenium is stable, Apache-2.0 software on 4.51.0 with bindings in five languages, CI passing on trunk, an llms.txt and an agent guide added in September 2026. It has no MCP server of its own, Selenium Manager sends usage statistics by default, and Grid accepts unauthenticated sessions unless a username and password are set.

Airtop

1. Terminate every session with DELETE /v1/sessions/{id}. Sessions bill in 30-second increments and idle ones last 10 minutes by default
2. Set costThresholdCredits on AI calls and read meta.usage.credits afterwards. Credit rates are not published, so measure them
3. Use page-query with configuration.outputSchema for structured output. prompt-content and summarize-content are deprecated
4. When calling REST without the SDK, poll session status until running before creating a window. Only the SDK waits for you
5. Airtop's integrated proxy cannot reach LinkedIn, ticketing sites and some banks and streaming services. Bring a custom proxy for those

Selenium

1. Install with pip install selenium (Python 3.10 or later) and let Selenium Manager fetch drivers. Do not set driver paths
2. Use WebDriverWait with expected conditions, never fixed sleeps, and do not mix implicit and explicit waits
3. Set SE_AVOID_STATS=true to stop Selenium Manager sending usage statistics
4. Point coding agents at https://www.selenium.dev/llms.txt. Most Selenium 2 and 3 era examples use removed APIs
5. Set --username and --password before exposing a Grid beyond localhost. Check http://localhost:4444/status before creating sessions