Comment by jasonwcfan
Comment by jasonwcfan 3 days ago
Thanks! Wasn't familiar with Browserless but took a quick look. It seems they're very focused on the scraping use case. We're more focused on the agent use case. One of our first customers turned us on to this - they wanted to build an RPA automation to push data to a cloud EHR. The problem was it ran as a single page application with no URL routing, and had an extremely complex API for their backend that was difficult to reverse engineer. So automating the browser was the best way to integrate.
If you're trying to build an agent for a long-running job like that, you run into different problems: - Failures are magnified as a workflow has multiple upstream dependencies and most scraping jobs don't. - You have to account for different auth schemes (Oauth, password, magic link, etc) - You have to implement token refresh logic for when sessions expire, unless you want to manually login several times per day
We don't have most of these features yet, but it's where we plan to focus.
And finally, we've licensed Finic under Apache 2.0 whereas Browserless is only available under a commercial license.
Sounds like a prooblem that can be solved with a Playwright script with a bit of error checking in it.
I think this needs more elaboration on what the Finic wrapper is adding to stock Playwright that can't just be achieved through more effective use of stock Playwright.