Why BrowserCat
There are three ways to get a cloud browser behind your Playwright, Puppeteer, or CDP code. This page is an honest look at all three, so you can decide what fits, even if the answer isn’t us.
The three options
1. Run your own browsers
You host headless Chromium yourself, on your own servers, containers, or functions.
- Upside: total control, no per-session vendor bill.
- Cost: you own the hard parts forever, warm pools, cold-start latency, crash recovery, memory leaks, scaling for spikes, patching, and isolation between untrusted pages. Most teams underestimate how much of this never ends.
This is the right call when browser infra is your product, or when a hard compliance requirement means it must run on hardware you control.
2. Pick one cloud provider directly
You connect straight to a single browser-as-a-service vendor.
- Upside: no infra to babysit; you’re up in minutes.
- Cost: you’re now coupled to one vendor’s roadmap, pricing, regions, and uptime. The day you need a capability they don’t offer, or they have a bad day, or their price changes, you’re rewriting against a different API.
This is fine when you have one narrow need and you’re confident it won’t change.
3. Use a router (this is us)
BrowserCat is a router for browser infrastructure: one endpoint, one API key, and we send each session to the backend best suited for the job. See how it works for the full flow.
- Upside: no infra to run and no single-vendor lock-in. You describe what a session needs and the router picks a backend that can deliver it, today Cloudflare for most jobs and Steel when a session brings its own proxy, with more on the roadmap. When a provider has a bad day, the router can route around it.
- Cost: you trust the router to choose well. We earn that by keeping the
/connectendpoint stable and the routing rules transparent.
How the router compares
| Run your own | Single provider | BrowserCat (router) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infra to operate | All of it | None | None |
| Vendor lock-in | None | High | None — swap backends, no rewrite |
| Capability breadth | Whatever you build | One vendor’s set | The best of every backend behind it |
| Failover | You build it | Single point of failure | Routes around unhealthy backends |
| Time to first session | Days–weeks | Minutes | Minutes |
When you might not need us
We’d rather you trust this page than feel oversold:
- If browser infrastructure is your core product, run your own.
- If you have exactly one need, it’s well served by one vendor, and it will never change, going direct is simpler.
For everyone else, automating, scraping, testing, or giving an AI agent a real browser, a router gives you managed infrastructure without betting your codebase on a single vendor.
Leaving is a one-line change
BrowserCat is built on open standards, Playwright, Puppeteer, and CDP. There’s no proprietary SDK to rip out. If you ever want to move, to a provider or to your own hardware, you change a connection string. That’s the point: you stay because it’s the best option, not because you’re stuck. See the full portability pledge for exactly what that guarantees.
Ready to try it? Start with the quick start.