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cdpfleet vs Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering)
Cloudflare's serverless headless Chromium — formerly Browser Rendering — against a fleet of twelve real browsers: $0.09/hour beyond 10 free hours plus concurrency fees, Cloudflare exit IPs that are always flagged as bot traffic and no proxies, or flat threads with any proxy and headful real browsers.
Cloudflare Browser Run (renamed from Browser Rendering in April 2026) runs headless Chromium on Cloudflare's network: from a Worker with @cloudflare/puppeteer or @cloudflare/playwright, through REST "quick actions" (screenshot, PDF, markdown, scrape, JSON extraction, crawl), or over CDP from anywhere. It's built for rendering and AI agents on the Cloudflare platform. cdpfleet is a fleet of twelve real desktop browsers — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox and WebKit — launched with one HTTPS call and driven over the Playwright protocol or CDP from five languages, through the proxies you choose. The two meet on "a browser in the cloud" and part ways on almost everything a scraper cares about: browser choice, exit IPs and how the browser presents itself.
| cdpfleet | Cloudflare Browser Run | |
|---|---|---|
| Browsers | 12 — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox, WebKit. Chrome with stable, beta and dev channels and pinned previous majors; headful (a virtual display) by default. | Headless Chromium; no choice of browser or version (an experimental Chrome-beta pool and a beta non-Chromium browser exist). Headful only in local development. |
| How you connect | Playwright protocol (connect(wsUrl), client 1.60) from Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go — or "cdp": true for a cdpUrl: Puppeteer, connectOverCDP or any CDP client (CDP & Puppeteer). | Workers bindings for Puppeteer (based on 22.13) and Playwright; REST quick actions; CDP over a WebSocket with an API token from any CDP client. Examples are JavaScript/TypeScript. |
| Session length | Up to 24 h (shared threads: also capped by your remaining daily minutes). Idle timeout 120 s by default, up to 10 min on shared threads and 24 h on dedicated; keep_alive lets you reconnect. | No fixed maximum while active; idle timeout 60 s by default, keep_alive up to 10–20 minutes (the docs disagree). Sessions also close when Cloudflare rolls out a new release. |
| Browser time | Free Community plan (invite-only for now): 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Per second, as thread-seconds. Shared: $0.02–$0.03 per browser-hour at full use; dedicated $0.0069/hour ($5.00/month for a browser around the clock). A headful session takes 2 threads. | Free: 10 minutes a day. Workers Paid: 10 hours a month included, then $0.09/hour (rounded per month), plus 10 concurrent browsers included and $2.00 for each extra (monthly average of daily peaks). |
| Concurrency | The threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request). | Free 3, Paid 200 concurrent browsers by default (more on request); new browsers 1 per 20 s on Free, 3 per second on Paid. |
| Proxies and exit IPs | Any proxy, free — HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, single, pools or per-host rules, with live swap; or the cdpfleet residential proxy (4 tiers from $0.50/GB, $5 free credit). | No proxies, no residential option, no IP rotation: all traffic leaves from Cloudflare's IP ranges, from wherever the session opens. |
| How sites see it | A real browser on your proxy's IP. Genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…, headful by default, plus three stealth builds. See headless tells. | "Always identified as bot traffic by Cloudflare", with fixed request headers (cf-brapi-*, Web Bot Auth signatures) you can't remove. No stealth mode. |
| Captcha solving | Not built in. Use any solver through Playwright. | None; a person can take over through Live View ("human in the loop"). |
| Watching a session | Live view with human takeover — Watch / Take control in the dashboard, or a link from the API — and Launch interactive: open any browser on a start page straight into live view from the dashboard's code generator (start_url over the API). Session recordings as MP4 (480p free, 720p or 1080p on a plan), and JPEG frames to your code with page.screencast. | Live View in the dashboard or DevTools; opt-in recordings as DOM/event replays (not video), kept 30 days, up to 2 hours. |
| Persistence | Persistent profiles keep cookies, local storage and IndexedDB between sessions (paid plans); Playwright storageState; keep_alive to reconnect to the same browser on dedicated threads. No extensions. | Reuse a running session by id; no profiles (store state yourself, e.g. in KV). Extensions not stated. |
| Agents and extras | None of its own: Playwright works with any agent framework or LLM. | REST quick actions incl. markdown, accessibility tree, crawl and AI JSON extraction (Workers AI, billed separately); MCP and Agents SDK integrations. |
| Where the browser runs | Servers in the EU (Germany and Finland); your proxy decides where traffic exits. | Cloudflare's global network, close to the request; no region choice. |
| Examples | 58 cases run on production in five languages, all on GitHub with their output. | Cloudflare docs and Workers templates. |
Cloudflare Browser Run facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 10 October 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.
Which one, when
Pick Cloudflare Browser Run if…
- You render pages on Cloudflare already — screenshots, PDFs, markdown for your own or cooperative sites — and want it next to your Workers.
- Your volume fits the free tier or the 10 included hours, and nobody minds that the traffic is labelled as a bot.
- You want REST endpoints (screenshot, PDF, crawl, JSON extraction) more than a browser you drive.
Pick cdpfleet if…
- The site must see a normal visitor: a real browser on a residential or your own proxy IP, not Cloudflare's ranges with bot headers.
- You need a specific browser or version — Chrome channels and pinned majors, Edge, Brave, Firefox, WebKit, Camoufox — or headful rendering.
- You drive the browser from Python, Java, C# or Go over the Playwright protocol.
- Sessions run for hours or around the clock on a flat-priced dedicated thread.
- You want to start free — the Community plan includes proxies — and try a browser in live view before writing any code.
Try it
The quickstart is one HTTPS call and five lines of Playwright; the code builder writes the launch for any browser and option set in your language.