Jumping Over ReCaptcha

Imagine this: It's a bright sunny day, and you're happily working on a scraper. Your scripts are running smoothly, pulling data, clicking buttons—until suddenly, it all stops. The dreaded ReCaptcha appears. You try again, we could just wait it out, right? Or let's try some proxies, or maybe adjust the User Agent. But nope, all of this is just a temporary bandage on a big gash.

If you're trying to scrape anything on the web now, captchas are a major issue. The most common one among those is ReCaptcha, so let's look at some ways of solving it.

Why Puppeteer and Playwright Struggle with ReCaptcha

When using automation tools like Puppeteer and Playwright, they often get flagged as bots because of:

• Consistent IP addresses or known datacenter proxies
• Absence of real browser fingerprints
  • A big one is the HeadlessChrome user agent instead of just Chrome.
• Fast and predictable navigation patterns
  • High volumes of traffic often trigger detection

Approaches to Solving ReCaptcha in Puppeteer and Playwright

1. Using External Captcha Solvers

Probably the most common approach is integrating with a third-party captcha-solving services like CapSolver or 2Captcha, which use human solvers or AI-based methods to sovle captchas. This can be implemented in Puppeteer or Playwright using a few API calls.

2. Using Hyperbrowser

In all honesty, what I care about is scraping the stuff that I want from a website, not solving Captchas. I don't know when they might appear, or where they might appear. Hyperbrowser instead takes care of the pesky stuff, so that you can focus on the real thing.

3. Other options

There's a few other options out there for bypassing ReCaptcha.

• Solving the image - There's a few options out there that can detect the images in the image grid. You can get the image(s) and pass it to the appropriate API, such as this. I wouldn't recommend this approach as it could be more tedious and expensive.

• Playwright Stealth/Puppeteer stealth - These used to be a viable options for captcha avoidance, and may still be viable for some stuff like ReCaptcha. But other captcha variants have been able to detect it for a while now, so it is hard to recommend it for anything else.

npm install playwright-extra puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

Conclusion

ReCaptcha is one of the biggest annoyances when it comes to web automation, but thankfully, there are ways to work around it. You could integrate a captcha-solving service, try different stealth techniques, or—better yet—just let Hyperbrowser handle it for you. Instead of constantly fighting against captchas, you can focus on actually getting the data you need.

If captchas are slowing you down, Hyperbrowser makes it easy to keep your automation running smoothly without constantly worrying about interruptions. Give it a try and see the difference!