Frequently Asked Questions
Browserless is a headless chrome browser as a service. Use Browserless to automate web based tasks like data collection, PDF generation, QA testing, and more.
You can use browserless to do automatically what you would normally do manually. For instance you can use it to take pictures of your web-site (for social media), or generate nice documents for your client's dashboards.
Getting Chrome, or any browser, to run on most web servers is pretty challenging as well. There's more than 20 additional packages you'll need to install, a way to manage the browser so it doesn't crash your servers, and a way to isolate your sessions so it's a fresh browser every time. We take care of all of that plus add notifications and a dashboard for you.
Yup! We have a GraphQL API that allows you to check your workers health prior to sending a request or connecting. You can use the online GraphiQL editor to see all the fields here. We also have an admin dashboard that shows important statistics like rejected or queued request counts.
Usage plans are great for infrequent usage, or unpredictable usage. They run on a fleet of many instances that we take care of and maintain. Great for getting started, and it's also free to do so!
Dedicated plans area good fit for traffic that is predictable. It's also fixed monthly, so there's no fluctuating costs or surprises, and are ideal for heavy workloads (WebGL and PDF printing are a few). Plus there's no noisy neighbors.
Commercial licenses are for when you want to use the browserless image, but on your own hardware or infrastructure. With a license, you can use them in proprietary systems or on the public cloud, but not repackage it or resell.
Even if you're not using Puppeteer or Playwright, you can still make use of our /function API that allows you to send in a body of code to run for you. This allows you to keep your stack the same without making changes. You can read more about the function endpoint here.
We don't store any sensitive information in browserless whatsoever. We use Stripe's payment API, so we never store credit card or other personal information, and we securely store your password with a one-way hashing algorithm. Your email is only used to contact you about updates to the service, and we don't sell or expose it to third-parties.
It generally takes about 5 minutes to generate the workers when you sign-up. When connecting via puppeteer.connect, this generally happens in less than 50 milliseconds. On average a screenshot capture happens in about a second for static pages, and PDFs take roughly 2 seconds.
See for yourself on the status page.
Yes, we provide our own inbuilt proxies, or you can connect to your prefered proxy provider.
Learn more in our Documentation
Reliability and Testing Customer Case Studies
"We were hosting our own Puppeteer-driven smoke testing service, which required specialized operational attention to maintain and scale. We began looking for third-party hosted solutions so that we could focus our attention on building and supporting our core products, and Browserless fit the bill."
"We don’t spend time babysitting tests and fighting flaky tests anymore. That is gone. We don’t think about it. Every test runs in isolation. This has been great because when tests flake, it’s one test alone and we can go patch it and move on."
"You have no idea how happy finding browserless was for me. I had no clue that remote devtools was even a thing a couple of months ago, and now I'm getting ready to deploy a production-ready app that uses it! There's no way I could've done it so quickly using other tools."
