# Cloudflare Browser Rendering [[Cloudflare]] Browser Run (called Browser Rendering until April 15, 2026) is a managed headless-browser service: Workers code calls into a [[Puppeteer]]- or [[Playwright]]-compatible API and gets a real Chromium browser running on Cloudflare infrastructure. Since April 2026 you can also drive it over the [[Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)]] from anywhere (your laptop, CI, another cloud), so it's no longer Workers-only. Use it to render PDFs, take screenshots, extract content, run end-to-end scrapes, or drive any browser automation flow without operating browser fleets yourself. It's the Cloudflare equivalent of Browserless, Browserbase, and ScrapingBee — but with the Workers binding model: no API keys to juggle, no client SDKs to choose between, just `env.MYBROWSER`. ## Why It Matters Headless browsers are operationally heavy: container fleets, memory limits, zombie processes, CAPTCHA hell, IP rotation. Browser Run handles all of it. For any Worker that needs to "look at a page like a real user would," it's a one-line capability. Common adjacent to [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]] — AI agents that need to browse the web. ## Core Capabilities - **Puppeteer-compatible API** (Cloudflare's `@cloudflare/puppeteer`) - **Playwright support** (`@cloudflare/playwright`), plus Stagehand and Playwright MCP for AI-driven browsing - **CDP access** from any environment, and MCP clients on top of it (April 2026) - **Quick Actions**: one HTTP request for a screenshot, PDF, Markdown, snapshot, links, scraped elements, AI-extracted JSON, an accessibility tree, or a whole site via `/crawl` (March 2026) - **Live View, Human in the Loop and Session Recordings**: watch an agent's session, let a human take over when it gets stuck, replay it afterwards (April 2026) - **WebMCP**: sites can expose structured tools that agents call directly (see [[WebMCP]]) - **[[KiteSurf|Kitesurf]]**: Cloudflare's own agent-first browser, built in Rust and WebAssembly and running in V8 isolates; pick it with `browser=kitesurf` (August 2026, free during the beta) - **Session reuse** across requests, and persistence through [[Cloudflare Durable Objects]] - **Egress IPs** distinct from the request origin ## Common Use Cases - **PDF generation** from HTML — invoices, reports, exports - **Screenshot APIs** for social-card previews, monitoring, OSINT - **Scraping** with JavaScript-rendered content - **End-to-end tests** running on production infra - **AI agents browsing the web** via [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]] - **Markdown extraction** from arbitrary URLs ## Limits Worth Knowing - **Workers Free**: 10 browser minutes per day, 3 concurrent browsers, `/crawl` capped at 5 jobs a day and 100 pages per crawl - **Workers Paid**: 10 browser hours a month included, then $0.09/hour; 10 concurrent browsers included (monthly average), then $2 per extra browser - **Paid defaults** (raised on August 20, 2026): 200 concurrent browsers, 3 new browsers per second, 30 Quick Actions requests per second; Cloudflare raises them on request - **Idle timeout**: 60 seconds without activity closes the browser; `keep_alive` stretches that to 10 minutes. There's no maximum session length as long as the session stays active - Memory per browser instance — heavy pages can OOM ## References - Browser Run home: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/ - Limits: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/limits/ - Pricing: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/pricing/ - Changelog, Browser Rendering is now Browser Run (2026-04-15): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-04-15-br-rename/ - Changelog, higher concurrency limits (2026-08-20): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-08-20-limits-increase/ - Changelog, /crawl endpoint (2026-03-10): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-03-10-br-crawl-endpoint/ - Changelog, CDP and MCP client support (2026-04-10): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-04-10-browser-rendering-cdp-endpoint/ - Changelog, Kitesurf (2026-08-06): https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-08-06-kitesurf/ - Puppeteer fork: https://github.com/cloudflare/puppeteer ## Related - [[Cloudflare]] - [[Cloudflare Workers]] - [[Cloudflare Agents SDK]] - [[Cloudflare Containers]] - [[Cloudflare Durable Objects]] - [[KiteSurf]] - [[Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)]] - [[WebMCP]] - [[Puppeteer]] - [[Playwright]]