BrowserBook vs. Cursor: An AI-powered IDE laser-focused on automating the web

What is Cursor?

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor designed to improve developer productivity across a wide range of programming tasks. It builds on familiar editor workflows and adds an embedded AI agent that can generate code, answer questions, and modify files across a project.

Cursor also includes an embedded browser, which is useful for web development workflows such as previewing changes, inspecting UI behavior, or debugging frontend code. This makes Cursor an excellent tool for building and maintaining web applications.

However, Cursor's core abstraction is still a codebase. The browser is a supporting tool, not the primary execution environment.

How BrowserBook is different

BrowserBook flips that relationship. The browser is the primary execution environment, and the code exists to control it.

BrowserBook is an IDE designed specifically for browser automation. You work in a notebook-style interface where each cell represents a step in a workflow. You can run steps individually, watch them execute in a real browser, inspect page state, and iterate until the automation behaves exactly as intended.

In contrast to Cursor, BrowserBook's AI agent is also purpose-built for automation workflows. Instead of helping you navigate a large codebase, it has the tools necessary to quickly and efficiently create Playwright automations, including:

• DOM tree inspection
• Code & markdown authoring
• Code execution

This makes BrowserBook feel less like a general coding assistant and more like a dedicated environment for building and operating browser automations.

Feature comparison

While Cursor provides powerful general-purpose tooling, BrowserBook is opinionated around the needs of browser automation.

When to use Cursor

Cursor is a great choice when your primary goal is to write and maintain application code. It works especially well for:

• General software development
• Refactoring and navigating large codebases
• Using AI to accelerate day-to-day coding tasks
• Debugging UI behavior during app development

Cursor's embedded browser is designed and particularly well-suited for iterating on web development workflows; however, it's not designed around the automation use case.

When to use BrowserBook

BrowserBook is a better choice when the browser is the workflow. It's designed for cases like:

• Automating recurring browser-based tasks
• Building QA and regression test suites
• Extracting or monitoring data from websites
• Creating internal operational automations
• Running customer-facing browser workflows

Because BrowserBook manages the automation stack and provides built-in replay, debugging, and deployment, it reduces the operational overhead that typically comes with production browser automation.

Why not just do this in Cursor?

You can build browser automations in Cursor - especially if you're comfortable wiring together Playwright, test runners, logging, and execution infrastructure yourself.

But Cursor doesn't provide:

• A step-by-step execution model for browser workflows
• Built-in execution history & replay of automation runs
• Automation-specific debugging and repair tools
• A managed way to deploy and operate automations over time

BrowserBook exists to fill that gap. It's not a replacement for Cursor as a general-purpose editor - it's a specialized environment for a different kind of work.

Summary

Cursor and BrowserBook both use AI to make developers more productive, but they are optimized for different problems.

Cursor is a general-purpose AI code editor with an embedded browser, designed for software development workflows. BrowserBook is an automation-focused IDE where the browser is the central abstraction and AI is tuned specifically for writing, running, and debugging deterministic browser automations.

If you're building software, Cursor is a great tool. If you're building browser automations you need to trust, debug, and operate in production, BrowserBook is the better fit.