browser-use vs Playwright MCP

browser-use vs Playwright MCP: licensing, GitHub activity, and what each is actually for. Neutral comparison, no paid rankings.

browser-use: Open source. 117,853 GitHub stars. Python library letting LLM-driven agents control a real browser from natural-language goals: click, type, navigate, and extract data.

Playwright MCP: Open source. 38,094 GitHub stars. Microsoft's official Model Context Protocol server exposing Playwright browser control to LLM coding agents via the accessibility tree, no screenshots or vision models required.