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Head to head · Browser automation · October 2026 research run

Puppeteer vs TinyFish

Puppeteer scores 70.6 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish's 67.7 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. TinyFish leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do browser automation.

Best browser automation tools for AI agents · All 120 browser comparisons

PuppeteerGoogle · SDK + MCP BB70.6/100#154 of 1076 TinyFishTinyFish · HTTP API B67.7/100#258 of 1076

Which one, for what

Puppeteer BB

Best for Agents that write and run Node.js scripts against Chrome or Firefox.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 80 against 60
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 55
  • Maintenance & community, 89 against 80
  • Transparency & trust, 70 against 59

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source

Watch for

No MCP server, CLI or llms.txt of its own. The docs point agents to the separate chrome-devtools-mcp project

TinyFish B

Best for Agents that want one account for a goal-driven web agent, a raw CDP browser, and free search and fetch.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 79 against 67
  • Security & auth, 57 against 52

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The terms of 17 August 2026 allow Tiny Fish to train and improve its models on customer data. No opt-out was found in the reviewed pages

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runPuppeteerTinyFishEdge
Reliability16%208060Puppeteer +20
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28185TinyFish +4
Agent ergonomics13%16.26779TinyFish +12
Security & auth14%17.55257TinyFish +5
Payments & pricing10%12.56055Puppeteer +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88980Puppeteer +9
Transparency & trust7%8.87059Puppeteer +11
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 70.6/100B 67.7/100

Facts side by side

FactPuppeteerTinyFish
KindSDK + MCPHTTP API
VendorGoogleTinyFish
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://agent.tinyfish.ai
TransportsHTTP
AuthNoneOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Proprietary service under Tiny Fish's terms of service. The MCP proxy @tiny-fish/mcp and the cookbook are MIT. The SDK packages state no licence in npm or PyPI metadata
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
MCP registrynot listedai.tinyfish.agent/web-agent
Last release2026-10-082026-10-07
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-08-17
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2025-12-14
Customer content may train modelsyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity96k stars, 11.5M npm/wk5.7k npm/wk, 6.5k PyPI/wk

Verdicts

Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a stable, Apache-2.0 library on 25.13.0, with ten releases since 27 July 2026, typed APIs, locators that wait and retry, and accessibility snapshots an agent can read. It has no MCP server or llms.txt of its own, and 10 of the 20 most recent CI runs on main failed between 7 and 13 October 2026.

TinyFish

OpenAPI documents are published for five APIs, errors carry typed codes and request IDs, and Search and Fetch are free within daily allowances. The terms let Tiny Fish train its models on customer data, run creation takes no idempotency keys, and the status page shows an hour or more of downtime on several days for the Browser and Search APIs.

Before you call either

Puppeteer

  1. Install with npm i puppeteer, which downloads a matching Chrome for Testing. Use puppeteer-core to bring your own browser
  2. Prefer page.locator() over page.$(). Locators wait for the element to be visible and stable before acting
  3. Read pages with page.accessibility.snapshot({interestingOnly: true}) rather than full HTML to keep output short
  4. Catch TimeoutError separately from TargetCloseError. The first can be retried, the second needs a new page or browser
  5. Packages are ESM only since 25.0.0. Use import puppeteer from 'puppeteer' rather than require

TinyFish

  1. Check result as well as status. A run can be COMPLETED while the goal failed, with result.status set to failure
  2. Don't retry POST /v1/automation/run blindly after a timeout. There are no idempotency keys, so list runs first to avoid duplicates
  3. Use /v1/automation/run-async or /run-sse when a run may need cancelling. Runs started with the synchronous endpoint can't be cancelled
  4. Allow 60 seconds for Browser session creation, connect Playwright to cdp_url (not base_url), and DELETE the session when done because billing is per minute
  5. Never put passwords in goal, which is logged. Pass use_vault: true with credential_item_ids, or use_profile: true for saved login state

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Puppeteer or TinyFish?

Puppeteer scores 70.6 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish's 67.7 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. TinyFish leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth.

Can an agent call Puppeteer and TinyFish without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Puppeteer. TinyFish has a hosted endpoint at https://agent.tinyfish.ai.

Are Puppeteer and TinyFish open source?

Puppeteer is open source (Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for TinyFish.

Other comparisons with Puppeteer or TinyFish

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