BrowserCat is a cloud headless browser API for scraping, testing, and automation. See how it works with Playwright and Puppeteer, plus its 2026 pricing.
BrowserCat's core value proposition is removing the operational burden of running headless browsers at scale. Teams building scraping pipelines, automated test suites, or PDF/screenshot generation tools have traditionally needed to provision and maintain their own fleet of headless Chrome instances, which involves handling memory-hungry processes, keeping Chrome versions in sync with automation library expectations, and scaling capacity up and down with demand. BrowserCat replaces that self-hosted infrastructure with a managed cloud endpoint: developers connect using the same tools they already know, Playwright, Puppeteer, or any Chrome DevTools Protocol-compatible client, by pointing at wss://api.browsercat.com/connect instead of a local browser binary.
Because the integration point is protocol-level rather than a proprietary SDK, teams generally do not need to rewrite their automation logic to adopt BrowserCat - existing scripts largely just need their connection target changed. This lowers switching costs and also means teams are not deeply locked into a vendor-specific way of writing automation, since the same scripts could, in principle, be pointed at a self-hosted browser or a different provider later if needed.
A meaningful slice of the browser automation market is built around simple, non-interactive scraping: fetch a URL, parse the returned HTML, done. BrowserCat differentiates itself by explicitly supporting fuller, more realistic browser sessions - logging into a website with credentials, clicking through multi-step flows, waiting for and interacting with dynamic, JavaScript-rendered content, and maintaining session state across those steps, much as a real user would. Many lighter-weight scraping APIs cannot do this reliably because they do not run a full browser engine capable of executing client-side JavaScript and preserving cookies or session tokens across multiple actions.
This matters for use cases beyond scraping too: automated end-to-end testing inherently requires simulating real user behavior across a multi-step flow (filling forms, clicking buttons, verifying resulting page state), and generating accurate PDFs or screenshots of modern web applications requires fully rendering JavaScript-heavy pages rather than working from raw, unrendered HTML. BrowserCat's credit-based pricing model, where a WebSocket session costs one credit per 30 seconds of use, reflects this design: pricing scales with how long and how complex an automated session actually runs, rather than charging a flat fee per page fetched.
BrowserCat is a cloud-based headless browser API used for web scraping, automated end-to-end testing, PDF generation, and screenshot capture, letting developers run browser automation without hosting their own browser infrastructure.
You point an existing Playwright, Puppeteer, or any Chrome DevTools Protocol-compatible client at BrowserCat's managed WebSocket endpoint, wss://api.browsercat.com/connect, instead of a locally installed browser.
BrowserCat uses a usage-based credit system. A free tier includes 1,000 credits per month, and a paid Business plan starts at 50 dollars per month with a larger credit allotment at a lower per-credit rate.
A WebSocket API session consumes one credit for every 30 seconds of activity, while a standard successful API request consumes exactly one credit regardless of how long it takes.
Yes. BrowserCat is designed to support full, interactive browser sessions, including logging into websites with credentials and completing multi-step workflows, which many simpler scraping APIs cannot do.
BrowserCat is operated by Browser Labs LLC, a Delaware corporation doing business as BrowserCat, founded in 2023.
Generally no. Because BrowserCat is compatible with standard automation tools like Playwright, Puppeteer, and the Chrome DevTools Protocol, most existing scripts only need their connection target changed rather than a full rewrite.
BrowserCat's paid Business plan, with a larger credit allotment and lower per-credit rate than the free tier, is designed for teams running automation jobs regularly in production rather than only occasional testing.