ArchiveBox vs Browserless
ArchiveBox and Browserless are both browser automation software. ArchiveBox is open source under MIT, with 29k GitHub stars. Browserless is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 14k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick ArchiveBox when
- You want your own lasting copies of web pages, for research, legal evidence or bookmarks, rather than relying on the Wayback Machine.
- Pick Browserless when
- You need a shared pool of headless browsers as a service for scraping or PDF generation, self-hosted or in Browserless's cloud.
Side by side
A self-hosted web archiver that takes URLs, bookmarks, browser history or feeds and saves each page as HTML, PDF, screenshot, WARC and media files, with a web UI, CLI and API.
Runs headless Chrome, Firefox and WebKit in Docker behind a WebSocket and REST API that Puppeteer and Playwright connect to, with session queueing and endpoints for screenshots and PDFs.
Version 0.9 is still pre-1.0 and upgrades have had breaking changes, and archiving many pages with Chromium uses a lot of disk and CPU.
The licence is free only for non-commercial use; commercial self-hosting needs a paid licence.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and command line
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Python, Django, Chromium, wget and SQLite
TypeScript, Node.js and Docker
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
29k GitHub stars
14k GitHub stars
Established: started 9 years ago, latest release v0.9.77.
Established: started 9 years ago, latest release v2.59.0.
Other comparisons
More browser automation tools and headless browsers
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-06 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.