This practitioner's frustration gets at something fundamental. Teams pick the wrong tool because they think browser automation and web agents are interchangeable approaches to the same problem. They're not. We've run millions of web agent sessions across thousands of sites, and the pattern repeats: selector-based automation deployed for workflows that need semantic understanding, or expensive LLM-powered agents handling deterministic tasks that traditional automation does better and cheaper.

The wrong choice doesn't just burn engineering time. It creates systems that break in ways you didn't plan for.

What They Actually Are

Browser automation (Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright) executes predetermined scripts targeting specific page elements through XPath selectors and CSS queries. You write code that says "click the button with ID 'submit-form'" or "extract text from this exact DOM path." Deterministic by design. Millisecond response times, predictable behavior, low marginal cost after initial build.

Web agents use large language models and computer vision to navigate websites dynamically. Instead of predetermined selectors, they interpret page content semantically: "find the cancellation policy" or "locate vendor contact information." They reason about what they see, taking seconds per reasoning loop but adapting to UI changes without breaking.

Here's what this means operationally. Traditional automation gives you speed but creates a maintenance tax. Teams spend 30-40% of their automation engineering time updating selectors as sites evolve. Web agents flip this. Higher per-run costs from LLM inference, but they handle the site redesigns that shatter selector-based systems.

The cost structure depends entirely on your workflow stability and volume patterns.

How They Break in Production

When websites redesign, selector-based automation fails catastrophically. CSS classes get randomly generated during A/B tests. Button IDs change. Minor HTML tweaks shatter scraper logic. At scale, maintaining selectors across dozens of sites becomes constant work. The maintenance tax compounds.

Web agents fail differently.

They don't break on layout changes, but they introduce inference latency and probabilistic failure modes. When they fail, it's usually because the reasoning loop misinterprets ambiguous page structure or times out on complex interactions. You can't debug a reasoning loop the same way you debug a broken selector. The failure mode is fundamentally different.

For enterprise deployments requiring 90%+ reliability, this changes everything about observability. Traditional automation needs selector health monitoring and timing logic for dynamic content. Web agents need reasoning trace inspection and latency profiling across distributed inference calls. Different failure modes demand different infrastructure.

When Each Approach Wins

Traditional automation wins when page structure stays consistent and you need deterministic behavior. Nightly jobs with stable pages and high volume. Compliance gates requiring auditability. Standardized extraction across fixed schemas. Low per-run cost matters more than maintenance overhead.

Web agents win when you need semantic understanding or workflows change frequently. "Extract all vendor names and corresponding cancellation policies" requires reading labels, interpreting tables, handling pop-ups. When UIs differ per tenant or change often, adaptive execution beats brittle selectors. Higher per-run cost becomes cheaper than constant selector maintenance.

For workflows running 10,000+ times daily on stable pages, traditional automation's maintenance tax stays manageable. You're updating selectors monthly, not daily. But for workflows across 100+ sites with frequent UI changes, that maintenance tax compounds. Web agents' higher per-run cost becomes the cheaper option.

Why the Distinction Matters

The infrastructure requirements differ fundamentally. So do the failure modes and cost structures. Teams that conflate browser automation and web agents build systems that can't scale. Either maintenance overhead consumes their engineering team, or per-run costs explode at volume, or they chose deterministic infrastructure for workflows that need semantic reasoning.

What each approach actually is, and what it costs to operate at scale, determines whether your web automation works in production or becomes another abandoned project.