Looking for a Browserless alternative? Here's an honest comparison. Browserless is hosted headless-browser infrastructure: you connect Puppeteer or Playwright to its browsers, or call its REST screenshot and PDF endpoints. Shotmint is only a rendering API: one HTTP request returns a screenshot, PDF or Open Graph image, paid per render with no monthly plan.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browserless | Monthly or annual subscription (units per month; 1 unit = up to 30 s of browser time per connection) | Prototyping $35/mo for 20,000 units · Starter $200/mo for 180,000 · Scale $500/mo for 500,000 · Enterprise on request (overage $0.0020 to $0.0015 per unit; annual billing is 30% less: $25, $140, $350 a month) | Free plan: 1,000 units/month, 2 concurrent browsers, 2-minute sessions | Monthly allowance |
| Shotmint | Prepaid credits, no subscription | €5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time) | 25 free renders a month, no signup | Never expire |
Browserless prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 21 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.
Browserless gives you whole browsers, not just captures: connect existing Puppeteer or Playwright scripts by changing one endpoint, keep sessions alive and reconnect, run Chrome, Firefox or WebKit, use residential or datacenter proxies, automatic CAPTCHA solving, Chrome extensions, screen recording, its BrowserQL language, an MCP server for AI agents, and self-hosting or private deployments with SOC 2 and HIPAA options. If you scrape, automate logins and forms, or run tests, or you need many concurrent browsers, Browserless is the better choice. Its free plan (1,000 units a month) also covers a few hundred captures a month at no cost, more than Shotmint's 25 free renders a month.
You only need screenshots and PDFs, your volume is above the Browserless free plan but low or irregular, and you would rather not keep a browser session alive. 2,000 renders a month cost €5 each month on Shotmint (€60 a year) against $35 a month ($420 a year) for Prototyping, and in quiet months you pay nothing because the credits never expire. Each render is one stateless request to /v1/screenshot or /v1/pdf (URL or raw HTML, full page, a CSS selector, dark mode, ad and cookie-banner blocking, cookies and auth headers for pages behind a login, PDF headers, footers and page numbers), there is no browser time to estimate, every render costs 1 credit, and failed renders are free. Signed /s/ URLs also let you put a screenshot in an <img> tag without exposing your key. We run a small shared pool (a few concurrent renders), with no proxies, CAPTCHA solving or session control, so for scraping or high concurrency Browserless is the right tool.
GET /v1/screenshot: PNG, JPEG or WebP screenshots of any URL, with full-page capture, custom viewport, retina scale, a single-element selector, dark mode, transparent backgrounds (omit_background), ad and cookie-banner blocking (block_ads), and hide_selectors.POST /v1/pdf: PDFs from a URL or raw HTML, with format, landscape, margins, backgrounds, header and footer templates, and page numbers.GET /v1/content: the main content of any page or PDF link as Markdown, plain text or clean HTML, with title, author and date, for LLMs and RAG.GET /v1/og: 1200×630 Open Graph cards from a title and subtitle, with signed public URLs you can put straight in an og:image tag.X-Credits-Remaining header.Shotmint is a new, small service. It has small Node and Python SDKs and integration guides, but no enterprise plans, SLA or team accounts yet (measured uptime and render times are public on /status). If you need those, Browserless may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.
ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, PDFShift, ApiFlash, PagePixels, ScreenshotAPI.net, HTML/CSS to Image, Microlink, Screenshot Machine, Screenshotlayer, Bannerbear, Placid, Browshot, Restpack, ScrapingBee, DocRaptor, pdflayer, html2pdf.app, PDFMonkey, Doppio, CaptureKit, Pdfcrowd, APITemplate.io, url2png, Firecrawl, CraftMyPDF, IronPDF, SelectPdf, Prince, Aspose.HTML, EvoPdf, PDF.co, CloudConvert, pdfEndpoint, Abstract Screenshot API, GrabzIt. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.
No signup, no card; the free key refills on the 1st of every month. If you need more, buy credits once: €5 for 2,000, €19 for 10,000, €59 for 50,000. They never expire, and they stack on top of the 25 free renders a month, which every key keeps. From a script, an AI agent, Make or Zapier, POST /v1/keys/free (no body) returns a key as JSON (openapi.json, no-code recipes).