Browser Use is a library, not a hosted service: it wraps Playwright with an interface built specifically for LLMs, translating natural-language instructions like finding the cheapest flight to a destination into the clicks, scrolls, and form fills needed to actually do it. That makes it the software layer that something like Browserbase's infrastructure often runs underneath.
It's become the most popular library of its kind by a wide margin, with around 117,000 GitHub stars, and reports an 89.1% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark, a standard set of real-world web tasks used to evaluate browser agents. Being MIT licensed and model-agnostic has helped it become a default building block rather than a complete product, which is exactly the role a library like this is supposed to play.
It's free to use, and its popularity says less about Browser Use specifically and more about how much of the current AI agent ecosystem needs reliable browser control as a basic capability, the same way an HTTP client is just assumed in most software.