What is Cloudflare Browser Run?
Browser Run is Cloudflare's hosted browser service, renamed from Browser Rendering on 15 April 2026. It runs headless Chrome (version 152 by default since 30 October 2026) on Cloudflare's network in two ways. Quick Actions are REST endpoints that return HTML, Markdown, screenshots, PDFs, links, structured JSON, an accessibility tree or a whole-site crawl from a URL. Browser Sessions let Puppeteer, Playwright, Stagehand or any Chrome DevTools Protocol client drive a browser directly, from a Worker or from any machine.
Kitesurf, launched on 6 August 2026, is a second engine inside Browser Run. Its core is Rust compiled to WebAssembly and each page runs in a Workers isolate rather than a Chrome process. It is free while in beta, behind per-account limits. Cloudflare published the source under Apache-2.0 on 12 November 2026 as cloudflare/kitesurf; it runs locally under wrangler dev, but deploying it to Cloudflare requires a Workers Paid plan.
Sessions add Live View, a Human in the Loop handoff for logins and multi-factor codes, and opt-in session recording.
Is Cloudflare Browser Run worth it?
Your agent needs to read one web page. Somewhere, a server has to start a whole copy of Chrome, wait for the page's JavaScript to finish, and keep that browser alive while the model decides what to click. Do that a few hundred times a day and you are running a small browser farm, with the memory bill and the 3am crashes that come with it.
Browser Run rents you that Chrome by the hour on Cloudflare's network. For simple jobs you send a URL and get back a screenshot, a PDF, Markdown or the page's structure, with nothing to deploy. For real control, your existing Puppeteer or Playwright script connects to a browser there and drives it as if it were on your laptop. You can watch a session live, let a colleague take over to type a login code, and switch on recordings to replay what went wrong.
The price is the easy part to like. The Workers Paid plan, $5 a month for the whole account, includes 10 browser hours; after that an hour costs $0.09, and each browser open at once beyond 10 adds $2 a month. Cloudflare's own example, 50 hours with about 15 browsers open at peak, comes to $13.60 on top of the $5. The free plan gives you 10 minutes a day, enough to see whether it works for you.
Kitesurf is the newer and more interesting part. It is Cloudflare's own browser engine, built for agents rather than people, and you switch to it by adding browser=kitesurf to the address. On Cloudflare's 14-site test it used 4.7 to 7 times less memory and 3.1 to 3.8 times less processor time than warm Chrome, but each page took 1.7 to 1.8 times longer. It is free while in beta. As of 12 November 2026 the code is open source, so you can run a test copy yourself, though a real deployment still lives on your own Cloudflare account.
The catch: Browser Run is a polite browser by design. Every request carries signed headers that tell the website it came from Cloudflare, Cloudflare's own bot protection always counts it as a bot, and there is no IP rotation, residential proxy or CAPTCHA solving. Sites that block automation will block it. Idle sessions close after 60 seconds unless you ask to keep them alive, for 20 minutes at most, and a session you forget to close keeps billing until it times out. Kitesurf cannot play video, draw WebGL, pass bot checks that inspect real TLS fingerprints or hold a long logged-in session, it has no Live View, and its benchmark figures are Cloudflare's own.
Your pages are processed and thrown away once the result comes back, according to Cloudflare's FAQ, with two exceptions: crawl results stay in Cloudflare's storage for 14 days, and recordings, if you turn them on, for 30 days with anything typed into form fields masked. Cookies or logins you hand a session sit on Cloudflare's browsers for as long as that session runs.
Our take: think of Browser Run as the cheap, honest way for an agent to look at the web. Screenshots, Markdown and clicks on sites that do not mind a bot cost cents an hour. Once your job depends on looking like a person, you have outgrown it and are shopping for something like Steel or Browserbase.
Where it earns its place
A developer adding link previews to a 20,000-user chat app
Turn pasted URLs into screenshots and short summaries without running Chrome
Call the /screenshot and /markdown Quick Actions from a Worker with quickAction(), which needs no API token. Usage is counted in seconds and billed at $0.09 an hour after the 10 included, so short renders cost little.
An AI engineer whose coding agent runs in Claude Code or Cursor
Give the agent a browser it can click through without installing Chrome
Point Playwright MCP or chrome-devtools-mcp at the Browser Run CDP endpoint with an API token. Add browser=kitesurf for read-mostly pages while Kitesurf is free in beta, and keep Chromium for pages that need video, WebGL or a login.
A support-operations lead automating supplier portals that send one-time codes
Let an agent fill in forms but hand the MFA step to a person
Run the flow as a Browser Session; at the login, Human in the Loop hands control to a colleague through Live View, who types the code before the agent carries on. Recording keeps a 30-day replay with input fields masked.
A docs team at a 50-person SaaS company
Crawl its own help centre into Markdown for a support bot
Start a /crawl job, which respects robots.txt and returns HTML, Markdown or JSON; results are kept for 14 days. Free accounts are capped at 5 crawls a day of 100 pages each, so this belongs on Workers Paid.
Before you commit
- Setup
- A Cloudflare account and an API token give you the REST Quick Actions in minutes; inside a Worker you add a browser binding instead. The dashboard Playground runs Quick Actions without code, though those requests are billed.
- Integrations
- @cloudflare/puppeteer, Playwright, Stagehand and any CDP client through a WebSocket endpoint; Playwright MCP and chrome-devtools-mcp for agents; Durable Objects for reusing sessions; Cloudflare Queues for crawl events; wrangler browser commands.
- Data and privacy
- Rendered HTML, screenshots and PDFs are discarded once returned. Crawl results stay in R2 for 14 days and opt-in recordings for 30 days, with input fields masked. Requests carry Web Bot Auth signatures identifying Cloudflare, and outbound IPs cannot be rotated.
- Cost at scale
- Workers Paid is $5 a month per account with 10 browser hours and 10 concurrent browsers, then $0.09 an hour and $2 per extra concurrent browser. Cloudflare's example of 50 hours at 15 concurrent browsers adds $13.60. Kitesurf's price after beta is not published.
- Limits
- Workers Paid: 200 concurrent browsers, 3 new browsers a second, 30 Quick Actions a second. Free: 3 browsers, one new browser every 20 seconds, one REST request every 10 seconds, 5 crawls a day. Sessions idle out after 60 seconds, 20 minutes at most with keep_alive; limits return HTTP 429.
What’s good
- $0.09 a browser hour after 10 included on the $5 Workers Paid plan
- Existing Puppeteer and Playwright scripts connect over CDP
- Page content discarded after rendering, outside crawls and recordings
- Live View and human handoff for logins and MFA codes
What’s not
- Always identified as a bot; no proxies, IP rotation or CAPTCHA solving
- Idle sessions close after 60 seconds, 20 minutes at most with keep_alive
- Kitesurf lacks video, WebGL, persistent sessions and Live View
- The free plan's 10 minutes a day is only enough to try it
Best for
Developers who want an agent to read, screenshot or click through cooperative websites for cents an hour, especially if they already deploy on Cloudflare Workers.
Cloudflare Browser Run alternatives
Cloudflare Browser Run: common questions
- Is Cloudflare Browser Run worth it?
- Browser Run is a cheap, well-documented way to give an agent a real browser, as long as the sites you need are happy to be visited by a declared bot. We rate it 4.1 out of 5.
- How much does Cloudflare Browser Run cost?
- Workers Free: 10 minutes of browser time a day, 3 concurrent browsers. Workers Paid ($5/month per account): 10 browser hours a month, then $0.09 an hour; 10 concurrent browsers (monthly average), then $2 per extra browser. Kitesurf free during beta; later pricing not published.
- What are the downsides of Cloudflare Browser Run?
- Always identified as a bot; no proxies, IP rotation or CAPTCHA solving; idle sessions close after 60 seconds, 20 minutes at most with keep_alive; kitesurf lacks video, WebGL, persistent sessions and Live View; the free plan's 10 minutes a day is only enough to try it.
- Who is Cloudflare Browser Run best for?
- Developers who want an agent to read, screenshot or click through cooperative websites for cents an hour, especially if they already deploy on Cloudflare Workers.
- How much does Cloudflare Browser Run cost for a team or in production?
- Workers Paid is $5 a month per account with 10 browser hours and 10 concurrent browsers, then $0.09 an hour and $2 per extra concurrent browser. Cloudflare's example of 50 hours at 15 concurrent browsers adds $13.60. Kitesurf's price after beta is not published.
- Is Cloudflare Browser Run safe for company data?
- Rendered HTML, screenshots and PDFs are discarded once returned. Crawl results stay in R2 for 14 days and opt-in recordings for 30 days, with input fields masked. Requests carry Web Bot Auth signatures identifying Cloudflare, and outbound IPs cannot be rotated.
- What are the best Cloudflare Browser Run alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are TinyFish, Apify and Jina Reader.
Answers checked Nov 13, 2026.
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