What the Backends Give You
When you connect to BrowserCat, you connect to one endpoint with one API key, and the router sends each session to the backend best suited for the job. You don’t pick a vendor, and you don’t write to a vendor’s API. You describe what a session needs, and you get the strengths of every backend behind the router. For how the routing works under the hood, see How BrowserCat Works.
What routing gives you
- One integration, many backends. Your Playwright, Puppeteer, or CDP code talks to a single
/connectendpoint. The breadth behind it grows without you touching a line. - The right backend per session. A quick render in a far-away region and a session that brings its own proxy want different things. The router matches each session to a backend that can deliver it.
- No lock-in to any one of them. Because you write to open standards, no backend can trap you. You stay for the results, not because switching means a rewrite. See Why BrowserCat for the full case.
What the live backends are great at
Cloudflare — global edge speed
Cloudflare powers most sessions today. It runs headless Chromium across a global edge network, so browsers spin up close to wherever your workload runs. For the everyday jobs, rendering pages, scraping, automation, testing, driving an AI agent’s browser, it’s fast to start and broadly capable, which is exactly why it’s the default route.
Steel — bring your own proxy
When a session needs to come from a specific network, you can bring your own proxy today, and the router sends those sessions to Steel, which is built to honor per-session proxy configuration. That means you control the egress path for the jobs that need it, without giving up the single endpoint or the single key.
It gets better on its own
The best part of routing is that the capability set behind the endpoint keeps widening. As more backends come online behind the same /connect URL, your integration picks up their strengths automatically, no migration, no new SDK, no contract to renegotiate. To see what each backend brings and what’s coming next, check the backend roadmap.
Ready to connect? Head to the quick start.