BrowserGateway is the OpenRouter for cloud browsers.

If you build with headless browsers, you already know the problem: every provider has strengths and weaknesses. Browserless is fast on connect, Steel handles anti-bot well, Browserbase has the best dashboard, BrowserCat has generous pricing, and self-hosted Chrome is free but hard to scale. BrowserGateway is an MIT-licensed router that sits in front of all of them so you write one connection URL and swap providers without changing a line of app code. Same API surface, different upstream. Priority, round-robin, least-connections, weighted, latency-optimized routing — you pick.

The AI-agent boom pushed the browser-as-a-service category into a real market. Every serious agent framework needs a browser somewhere. But picking one provider locks you into their outage schedule, their pricing changes, their captcha capability, their region coverage. That's exactly why OpenRouter (the LLM aggregator) works — write once, route across every provider you already use. We're doing the same shape for browsers.

OpenRouter vs BrowserGateway

One connection URL

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

// Connect once. Route to Browserless, Steel, Browserbase, or your
// self-hosted Chrome — decided at BrowserGateway's routing layer.
const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: 'wss://cdp.browsergateway.io/v1/connect?token=YOUR_TOKEN'
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://en.wikipedia.org/');

What's actually happening

BrowserGateway is a byte-level router in front of your browser providers. When Puppeteer or Playwright connects, we pick which upstream to route to based on:

• Your priority ordering
• Real-time capacity per provider (least-connections)
• Latency observed on the last N sessions
• Weight (Nginx-style smooth weighted round-robin)
• Which providers can serve the profile you asked for

Failure on one provider fails over to the next without your code noticing. Profile state (cookies, localStorage) captures on session end and replays across providers on the next connect. Session recording captures CDP screencast frames and encodes to MP4 in the background. All of it is MIT-licensed and self-hostable.

When you'd use BrowserGateway

• You already pay for more than one browser provider (or want to).
• You want to swap providers without redeploying app code.
• You need per-tenant browser profiles that survive provider changes.
• You need session replay for debugging agent runs.
• You want an MIT license, not a proprietary SaaS lock-in.

When you wouldn't

• You're doing one-off scripts against a single Browserless account. Use their SDK directly.
• You need built-in anti-bot / stealth as a first-class product. Bring your own residential proxy provider — we don't ship stealth.
• You want a fully-managed browser fleet that we run for you. We route to browsers, we don't operate them.

FAQ