// the find
browserless/browserless
Deploy headless browsers in Docker. Run on our cloud or bring your own. Free for non-commercial uses.
Browserless runs Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Firefox and WebKit in Docker containers and exposes them over WebSocket, so Puppeteer and Playwright scripts connect to a remote browser instead of launching one locally. It suits teams that would rather run a container than maintain browser system packages, fonts and session handling in CI or scraping workers.
The WebSocket endpoints speak the stock Puppeteer and Playwright protocols, so moving an existing script over usually means changing the connection string. The source has a separate route tree per engine (chrome, chromium, edge, firefox, webkit), each with its own WebSocket handlers. The management routes expose live session state (active, sessions, kill, pressure, metrics), and the kill-sessions specs and leak-check workflow show the session lifecycle is tested, which is the part most homemade Chrome-in-Docker setups get wrong. Fonts and emoji ship in the image (Selawik, Emoji.ttf, fonts.conf), which removes a common reason headless screenshots look wrong in CI.
The license is SSPL-1.0 OR a commercial license. Running the free image in a closed-source product or closed CI needs a paid license, and SSPL is not OSI-approved, so this is source-available rather than open source for anyone deciding on behalf of a company. The HTTP route set is duplicated per engine: chrome, chromium and edge each carry the same eleven handler files and matching specs, so a fix has to land three times. Firefox and WebKit only get the Playwright WebSocket route and two specs, so the REST helpers are effectively Chromium-only. The feature list is long, but most of the headline items (BrowserQL, persistent sessions, session replay, extensions, residential proxy, /crawl, /map, /search) are cloud or enterprise only, and the README is dense with tracking-tagged links, so read it as a sales page around a free core.