BrowserGateway is an open router for cloud browsers, mainly intended for developers and teams that need to uniformly orchestrate multiple browser providers in large-scale browser automation. It routes Puppeteer, Playwright, Stagehand, browser-use, and any MCP client to Browserless, Steel, Browserbase, Lightpanda, or your own Chrome, providing the capability of "one endpoint, all providers."
Main capabilities
- Intelligent routing: supports five routing strategies: priority chain, round robin, least connections, latency optimization, and weighted distribution.
- Automatic failover: automatically switches to the next provider when one is unavailable, with TTL-based cooldown and automatic recovery.
- Persistent profiles: captures cookies, localStorage, and IndexedDB, replays them across providers, and encrypts them at rest with AES-256-GCM, decrypting only within the gateway.
- Session replay: performs CDP screencasting for each session at the routing layer, with JPEG frames deduplicated by SHA-1, allowing the dashboard to replay frame by frame on a timeline, and supporting one-click export to MP4 (ffmpeg is automatically installed on first export).
- Concurrency and queues: maxConcurrent can be set for each provider; when all providers are busy, connections enter a FIFO queue instead of failing immediately, and the timeout is configurable.
- MCP server: automatically detects the system Chrome and starts on first use, providing AI agents with 8 browser tools: navigation, screenshots, snapshots, interaction, evaluation, and more, with zero configuration.
- Health monitoring and alerting: periodically probes provider connectivity, detects unhealthy states and skips them, and sends notifications when a provider goes down, recovers, enters cooldown, or the queue overflows.
- Protocol-agnostic: supports CDP, the Playwright protocol, and WebDriver BiDi, and raw TCP pipes can forward any WebSocket protocol.
- Session reconnection: after the client disconnects, it can reconnect to the same browser via session id, preserving cookies and page state.
How to use BrowserGateway is available as an npm package and a Docker image. It can be installed locally, run on your own cluster, or used with your own Chrome. The documentation provides command examples for starting the gateway and dashboard, an MCP server for agents, and testing provider health. Users can manage providers and view live sessions through the dashboard, CLI, and YAML configuration,Edit configuration and monitor health. The cloud version builds on self-hosting by providing managed operations, global edge, session observability, recorded MP4 player, team member roles and invitations, separate pre-release and production routers, unlimited concurrent sessions, daily automatic backups, managed retention, as well as upgrades, uptime, and storage hosting.
Use cases
- Teams that want to gain routing, failover, and connection pooling capabilities for their existing Puppeteer/Playwright code with zero changes or only a one-line URL change.
- Automation projects that need to distribute load across multiple browser providers, avoid single points of failure, and control costs.
- Scenarios that use AI agents for browser operations and need persistent login, session replay, and MCP tool support.
- Scenarios that need to self-host browsers within their own VPC and achieve on-demand automatic scaling.
Limitations The free BYOK routing supports up to 10,000 sessions per month; usage beyond that, as well as recording, observability, and other items, are deducted from a prepaid credit wallet. The cloud version is paid, and specific pricing and plans are not yet provided. Self-hosting is MIT licensed, and the open-source gateway and browser runtime need to be deployed and maintained by the user. Details such as the cloud version's geographic regions and SLA are not yet provided.
