Token cost in browser automation MCPs has become a real topic — articles like compresses DOM state to a fraction of the original, and some tools add vision-based fallbacks for layout understanding.
I've been working on and WebClaw as MCP servers in the same Claude Code session, then ran the same steps on each:
- Navigate to the target URL
- Call the snapshot tool (
browser_snapshot/page_snapshot) - Measure the full response text length in characters
- Estimate tokens as
characters / 4(approximation — actual tokenization varies by model)
Both tools return the complete accessibility tree with no truncation. WebClaw's default is unlimited output (no token budget), so this is a pure format efficiency comparison.
I picked three pages with different content patterns:
Wikipedia — long article with many reference links and navigation templates
GitHub — repository page with file listing, README, and sidebar
Hacker News — list-style page with 30 items
Important caveat on fairness: Playwright MCP runs a headless Chromium (not logged in). WebClaw runs in the user's Chrome (logged in to GitHub in my case). This means WebClaw sees more UI on GitHub — authenticated menus, notifications, repo actions — which actually increases its output. The comparison is biased against WebClaw on that page.
Results: Format Efficiency
Both tools returning full, untruncated accessibility trees:
| Site | Playwright MCP | WebClaw | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19,409 tokens (77,637 chars) | 4,304 tokens (17,215 chars) | 78% smaller | |
, : extract the zip, go to chrome://extensions/, enable Developer mode, and load the dist/ folder.
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