Browserless

📋 Table of Contents

• Get Started in Seconds
• Features
• Customisable Deployment Options
• Why Browserless?
• Licensing

🚀 Get Started in Seconds!

Get up and running in three simple steps:

Step 1: Run the Docker image

docker run -p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/browserless/chromium

Step 2: Open the docs in your browser

Visit http://localhost:3000/docs

✅ Success! Your browser service is live at ws://localhost:3000

Step 3: Connect your script with Puppeteer or Playwright

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: 'ws://localhost:3000',
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
console.log(await page.title());
await browser.close();

import pw from 'playwright-core';

const browser = await pw.firefox.connect(
  'ws://localhost:3000/firefox/playwright'
);

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
console.log(await page.title());
await browser.close();

Note: Use ghcr.io/browserless/firefox or ghcr.io/browserless/multi for Firefox/Webkit support.

Output:

Example Domain

✨ Features

General Features

• Parallelism and queueing — Handle multiple sessions with configurable concurrency limits
• Debug Viewer — Actively view and debug running browser sessions in real-time
• Unforked libraries — Works seamlessly with standard Puppeteer and Playwright
• Fonts & emoji — All system fonts and emoji support out-of-the-box
• Configurable timeouts — Set session timers and health-checks to keep things running smoothly
• Error tolerant — If Chrome crashes, Browserless won't
• ARM64 architecture support — Full support for ARM64 platforms including Apple Silicon; some browsers (Edge, Chrome) have limited ARM64 compatibility

Premium Features

Our Self-serve cloud and Enterprise offerings include all the general features plus extras, such as:

• BrowserQL for avoiding detectors and solving captchas
• Hybrid automations for streaming live browser sessions during scripts
• Persistent Sessions for persisting browser state (cookies, cache, localStorage) across multiple sessions with configurable data retention up to 90 days
• Session Replay for recording and debugging browser sessions with event capture and video playback
• Chrome Extensions Support for loading custom extensions including ad blockers, captcha solvers, etc.
• Advanced Captcha/Stealth Routes for enhanced anti-detection with Captcha solving, fingerprint randomization, and residential proxy rotation
• REST APIs for tasks such as retrieving HTML, PDFs or Screenshot etc.
• Inbuilt residential proxy for automatic IP rotation and geo-targeting with residential proxy networks
• /smart-scrape API for intelligently scraping any URL using cascading strategies (HTTP fetch, proxy, headless browser, captcha solving)
• /crawl API for asynchronously crawling entire websites and scraping every discovered page into structured, LLM-ready data
• /map API for discovering all URLs on a website via sitemaps and link extraction, with search-based relevance ranking
• /search API for searching the web and optionally scraping each result page into structured formats (markdown, HTML, links, or screenshots)
• MCP Server for connecting AI assistants (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf) directly to Browserless browser automation
• Webhook Integrations for queue alerts, rejections, timeouts, errors, and health failures

💡 Why Browserless?

Running Chrome in the cloud or CI sucks.

Missing fonts. Random crashes. Dependency hell. Lambda limits. You know the drill.

Browserless solves this by handling browsers as a managed service — locally or in our cloud — so you can focus on automation, not infrastructure. We've taken care of the hard parts: system packages, font libraries, security patches, scaling strategies, and CVEs.

You still own your script. You still control your code. We just make sure the Browser runs smoothly, every time.

📜 Licensing

SPDX-License-Identifier: SSPL-1.0 OR Browserless Commercial License.

If you want to use Browserless to build commercial sites, applications, or in a continuous-integration system that's closed-source then you'll need to purchase a commercial license. This allows you to keep your software proprietary whilst still using browserless. You can purchase a commercial license here. A commercial license grants you:

• Priority support on issues and features.
• On-premise running as well as running on public cloud providers for commercial/CI purposes for proprietary systems.
• Ability to modify the source (forking) for your own purposes.
• A new admin user-interface.

Not only does it grant you a license to run such a critical piece of infrastructure, but you are also supporting further innovation in this space and our ability to contribute to it.

If you are creating an open source application under a license compatible with the Server Side License 1.0, you may use Browserless under those terms.

Happy hacking!

Need help? Reach out to us at support@browserless.io

🚢 Customisable Deployment Options

Select the deployment model that best fits your needs:

🔓 Open Source (Self-Hosted)

Free, self-hosted solution with core browser automation capabilities.

Best for: Testing, development, and small projects

↓ Quickstart above

🏢 Enterprise Docker (Self-Hosted)

Full Enterprise features in a self-hosted container.

Best for: Production workloads requiring data sovereignty

→ Learn More

☁️ Cloud (Self-Serve)

Fully managed, pay-as-you-go service with automatic scaling.

Best for: Quick starts and rapid prototyping

→ Start Free

🔒 Private Deployment

Custom Enterprise infrastructure across major cloud providers.

Best for: Large-scale enterprise deployments

→ Contact Sales

Want to dive deeper? Check out this detailed guide for advanced stuff including Docker configuration, hosting providers, SDK extensions, and more.