Basic bypassing methods

These 3 will get you passed most bot detection mechanisms, https://www.browserless.io/docs/bypass-bot-detection.

1) Use the &headless=false flag: Some sites will check your user-agent, which by default explicitly claims you're running headless chrome, this is a dead giveaway. It can be changed by setting a specific user-agent but we highly recommend you use the &headless=false flag instead, which changes your user-agent to a more credible one.

2) Use the &stealth flag: It implements puppeteer's puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth plugin which applies various techniques to make detection of headless puppeteer harder.

3) Use our in-built proxy or use a third-party proxy Finally, the hardest sites to crack down check your IP address; there are two type of bocks that can occur, those based on type of IP, and those based on frequency of requests (rate-limits):

Sites checking the type of IP address will detect your data-center IP addresses when using browserless. To overcome this, using a proxy with residential IP addresses will be the best option.
Sites t

Question 2

It's working locally but not with browserless

Accepted Answer

The type of issue your facing may have different root causes, is your site not loading or are you experiencing different behaviors or timeouts?

Here are a couple things you can try if the site won't load properly:

Use the &headless=false flag to emulate a browser window and run headful (xvsb), it also sets a use-like user agent.
Some sites check your geolocation and will only display information for people in certain countries. Our shared fleet is in San Francisco, so if the site isn't accesible from there, you'll have to use a proxy in a certain country, or subscribe to our Dedicated plan which allows you to select a server location.
There might be anti-bot detection mechanisms, which may not come up when running in your local environment, since your IP is residential, and your fingerprint is solid. So you may want to implement anti-bot mechanisms.
This one's not so common, but it could be the browser's version, you can check the current version on the shared fleet in our docs. Our dedicated plans allow you to choose your browser and puppeteer version, we even support chrome stable which comes with additional codecs and helps with sites that require displaying or streaming media, such as twitch and similar sites.

If the site is loading, but it's behavi

Question 3

Using more units than expected

Accepted Answer

You might be using too many units because you're not closing the browser after you're done using it, and reaching the default 15-minute global timeout (consuming 30 units per browser).

The quickest fix is to set the max timeout you expect your browser to run by modifying the timeout flag, this will ensure your browsers closes once this timeout is reached e.g. if your sessions take less than 10 seconds, you can set the timeout to 30000 (30 seconds in milliseconds) and it'll ensure you never use more than 1 unit per request.

The best practice is to handle exceptions and close the browser every time. You might have the browser.close() in your code, but when an unexpected error or timeout occurs, it won't reach that line of code, causing your connection to the browser to disconnect but the browser stays alive, consuming units. The suggestion is to use try/catch blocks to catch these unhandled errors and ensure the browser is always closed, read 7 tips to making your puppeteer scripts more bulletproof.

Question 4

Increase the default timeout

Accepted Answer

The default timeout for browser sessions on the cloud-subscription plans is set to 15 minutes. You can increase or decrease this value with the &timeout flag. On dedicated plans, you can set the maximum global timeout in the worker settings, which will apply to all your sessions or set the &timeout flag for each individual browser session.

Question 5

Is there a free plan?

Accepted Answer

We do not offer a free plan. However you can test our service for free on a 7-day trial by adding card on file. If you'd like to see our available plans, you can check out or pricing page and if you have enterprise-level requirements, feel free to contact us for a more tailored experience onboarding to Browserless.

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