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MCP-native slots instead of ephemeral browser-hours.
Shade is not trying to be a general REST API first. It is a remote MCP browser fleet where one connection gives agents named identity slots, saved sessions, structured supervision events, and human takeover.
Comparison reviewed June 2026. Competitor offerings change; check their current docs before buying.
| Capability | Shade | Browserbase | Steel | Playwright-MCP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billing mental model | Persistent identity slot: saved sessions, consistent fingerprint, logins persist across runs | Usage/browser-hour pricing with session and context primitives | Usage/browser-hour pricing with session and profile primitives | Local browser process and host resources |
| Primary integration | MCP-native remote fleet over one connection | Browser platform with REST/SDK APIs and a Stagehand-based MCP integration | Sessions API and SDK-first browser cloud | Local MCP server launched per client |
| Identity continuity | Named slots designed to survive agent runs | Contexts can reuse cookies, authentication, and application data across sessions | Profiles and auth-context reuse can carry browser state across sessions | Depends on local profiles and client setup |
| Fleet visibility | One console for up to 20 slots plus human takeover | Session live view, recordings, replays, logs, and inspector tooling | Live and past session embeds plus agent trace surfaces | Local MCP introspection over the browser it launches |
| Token profile | Synthetic action view from structured events; benchmark coming soon | Browser/session telemetry depends on the chosen Browserbase integration | Session views and traces depend on the chosen Steel integration | Accessibility-tree snapshots are the core MCP interaction surface |
| Abuse-sensitive features | Opt-in personality, leak checks, no CAPTCHA solving, no residential proxies | Agent identity, verified browser, proxy, and CAPTCHA capabilities documented by Browserbase | Stealth, proxy, and CAPTCHA capabilities documented by Steel | No hosted anti-detect service |
Token-efficiency wedge
Watch the fleet without paying snapshot tax
Accessibility snapshots are useful when an agent needs page structure, but they are a heavy supervision primitive when a human only needs to watch progress across many slots. Shade's console reconstructs activity from structured events: navigation, clicks, form edits, downloads, wallet prompts, leak checks, and takeover state. That gives humans a synthetic action view without feeding every page tree back through the model.
Measured June 11, 2026 across 7 real pages (Wikipedia, GitHub, Stripe, NYTimes, MDN, HN, python.org): Shade's browser_snapshot is hard-capped at ~1,500 tokens regardless of page weight - 3-13x smaller than an uncapped accessibility tree (the same Playwright API playwright-mcp emits) and 100x+ smaller than raw HTML. On nytimes.com that is 1,281 tokens vs 553,782 for raw HTML. Reproducible: benchmarks/token_efficiency.py.