Camoufox vs undetected-chromedriver

Both tools exist because plain Selenium and vanilla Playwright get caught. Drive a browser with the defaults and it announces itself a dozen ways, from navigator.webdriver to DevTools artifacts, and modern anti-bot vendors read every one. So people reach for a stealth layer. The question is which layer, and the honest answer depends on your target and your existing code more than on which tool has the louder fan base.

Here's the split that decides almost everything. One tool bolts stealth onto a browser that anti-bot vendors already know by heart. The other rebuilds the browser so the tells never exist in the first place. Let's take both apart.

The short answer

If you don't want the full read: for a target with real anti-bot protection in 2026, Camoufox is the stronger pick, because it spoofs at the engine level where a detector can't inspect the patch. undetected-chromedriver is easier to drop into an existing Selenium project and it's fine on lightly defended sites, but its last stable release landed back in early 2024, and it's increasingly caught on serious targets. Tellingly, its own author moved on to build a different tool.

Neither one hides your IP address, so on a protected site both need residential proxies to stand a chance. More on that below, because it's the part people skip and then wonder why their perfect fingerprint still gets blocked.

undetected-chromedriver in a minute

undetected-chromedriver is a patched Selenium WebDriver for Chrome. It drives real Chrome, and it works by cleaning up the tells that stock ChromeDriver leaves behind. It patches the chromedriver binary to neutralize the cdc_ variable that gives Selenium away, strips the --enable-automation switch and friends, and keeps a few automation properties from leaking into the page.

For years that was enough, and for easy targets it still is. The problem is structural. It's still Chrome driven over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and anti-bot services learned to spot CDP artifacts, like the Runtime.Enable call automation triggers on startup. Chromium is also the single most-scrutinized engine on the web, so it draws the most heat. You patch, the vendor detects the patch, you patch again. It's an arms race, and lately the tool has been losing it, with users reporting endless Cloudflare Turnstile loops on setups that a plain browser walks right through.

Camoufox in a minute

Camoufox takes the opposite route. It's a custom build of Firefox, maintained by a developer who goes by daijro and shipped under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and the spoofing is compiled into the browser's C++ internals rather than injected as JavaScript. Because the values are faked down at the engine level, the properties a site reads back, navigator, WebGL, canvas, fonts, WebRTC, geolocation, all look native, because as far as the page can tell they are. There's no evasion script sitting in the DOM for a detector to trip over.

It talks to your code through Playwright, sync or async, so if you've written Playwright before it's a drop-in. A handful of constructor options carry the weight: os picks the fingerprint's operating system (hand it a list to rotate), humanize gives you curved, human-looking cursor paths, geoip=True lines up timezone and locale with your proxy's exit IP, and on a headless Linux box headless="virtual" runs it on a virtual display that some detectors trust more than raw headless. We go deep on all of that in the full Camoufox guide.

Head to head

The real difference: patch vs rebuild

Strip away the engine choice and you're left with two philosophies. undetected-chromedriver patches a browser anti-bots already recognize, and the patching never ends. Camoufox builds a browser where the leaks were never there to begin with. That's not a small distinction. It's the whole ballgame.

A patch is inspectable. Overwrite a native function from the outside and its toString() can stop reading [native code]. Redefine a property and the descriptor looks off. Ride the DevTools Protocol and the protocol handshake itself becomes a signal. Vendors like Cloudflare and DataDome test for exactly those tells, and they only need to catch you once. Spoof at the engine level and there's simply nothing sitting in the page to inspect. That's why Camoufox holds up on targets where the patched-Chrome approach falls over.

The catch, and this is the fair counterweight, is that Camoufox is Firefox. Its TLS handshake has a Firefox shape, a different cipher order than Chrome. On most targets that's an advantage, since a lot of them are tuned to block Chrome-shaped automation and wave Firefox through. On a few it's the opposite. And a small number of sites lean on Chromium-only APIs and just behave oddly in Firefox. If a specific target acts weird, that's usually why.

Maintenance is the tiebreaker

This is the part people underweight, and it might matter more than any single fingerprint test. Anti-detection is not a "set it and forget it" dependency. Vendors ship countermeasures constantly, so a stealth tool is only as good as its last update.

undetected-chromedriver hasn't shipped a fresh stable release since early 2024, and it's carrying a long backlog of open issues. It still gets millions of downloads, which cuts against it as much as for it: a tool that popular is exactly what detection vendors build signatures against. The loudest signal of all is that its creator went and built Nodriver, a from-scratch successor, after concluding that patching WebDriver-based tools was a losing battle. When the author moves on, that tells you something.

Camoufox isn't spotless here either, and I'll say so plainly. It's pre-1.0, the docs warn it may not be ready for stable production use, and it went through a maintenance gap. But it's under active development again in 2026, and the engine-level design means it isn't playing the endless patch-and-repatch game in the first place. Pin your version in production and expect the occasional breaking change, same as any pre-1.0 tool.

Neither one hides your IP

Read this part twice, because it's the mistake everyone makes first. Camoufox and undetected-chromedriver both spoof the browser. Neither touches your IP address. Run either one straight off a server and the target sees your datacenter IP, which on a protected site is often enough to get you blocked before your fingerprint even matters. undetected-chromedriver's own docs say it outright: it does not hide your IP, and a datacenter address won't pass.

So on any serious target, both tools need residential proxies, real IPs assigned to home internet connections, sitting in front of them. This is the great equalizer between the two, and it's where most scraping jobs quietly succeed or fail. We break down how to choose a pool in the residential proxy guide, and the IP layer is step one in the full bot-detection checklist.

When undetected-chromedriver still wins

It's not dead, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Reach for it when:

• You already have Selenium code. Swapping webdriver.Chrome() for uc.Chrome() is close to a one-line change. Rewriting a working codebase into Playwright to switch engines is rarely worth it for a light target.
• The target's protection is mild. Basic Cloudflare or a homegrown bot check, plus decent IPs, and it'll get you through with the least fuss.
• You genuinely need Chrome. Some sites behave differently enough that a Chromium engine is the safer bet, and a Firefox fork isn't an option.

One honest footnote: if you're staying on the Chrome side, the better-maintained options in 2026 are usually SeleniumBase UC Mode or the same author's Nodriver, both of which get more frequent attention than undetected-chromedriver itself.

When to pick Camoufox

Pick Camoufox when the target actually fights back, when you're starting fresh or already on Playwright, and when you're fine living on Firefox. Cloudflare with teeth, DataDome, a site that's been blocking your patched-Chrome runs, that's the territory where engine-level spoofing earns its keep. You pay for it in resources, since a real browser is RAM and CPU heavy at scale, but on a protected target that's the price of getting in at all.

One case sits outside both tools entirely: managing lots of accounts by hand, each with its own persistent profile, through a point-and-click interface. That's not headless scraping, and neither of these is built for it.

FAQ

Is undetected-chromedriver still maintained in 2026?

Barely. The last stable release landed in early 2024, and the issue backlog has piled up since. It still works on easy targets, but it's no longer keeping pace with Cloudflare and DataDome, and the author has shifted focus to a newer project, Nodriver.

Is Camoufox better than undetected-chromedriver?

On a protected target, yes. Spoofing at the engine level holds up where a patched Chrome driver gets caught, because there's no injected script for a detector to read. On an easy site with a Selenium codebase already in place, undetected-chromedriver is the faster path and the difference won't matter.

Can I use Camoufox with Selenium?

No. Camoufox speaks Playwright, not Selenium's WebDriver protocol. If your code is Selenium and you don't want to port it, stay on the Chrome side with undetected-chromedriver or SeleniumBase UC Mode.

What about playwright-stealth or Nodriver?

playwright-stealth is fine for light detection but shares undetected-chromedriver's weakness, it patches from JavaScript, so a detector can inspect the patch. Nodriver is the undetected-chromedriver author's newer, non-WebDriver Chrome tool and a reasonable Chromium-side pick. For the heaviest targets, Camoufox's engine-level approach still tends to hold up best.

Do I still need proxies with either one?

For anything protected, yes. Both tools hide that you're automating a browser. Neither does a thing about your IP. Residential proxies handle that half, and skipping them is the fastest way to get blocked no matter which tool you run.