Chromeless vs Puppeteer

Overview

Chromeless

Stacks14

Followers29

Votes0

Puppeteer

Stacks1.0K

Followers582

Votes26

Chromeless vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will provide a comparison between Chromeless and Puppeteer, two popular tools for web automation and testing.

Headless Chrome Support: One key difference between Chromeless and Puppeteer is their approach to headless Chrome support. Chromeless is focused on providing a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome, while Puppeteer is a Node.js library specifically designed to control the Chrome or Chromium browser. This means that Puppeteer offers more fine-grained control and access to Chrome's features, while Chromeless abstracts away some of the low-level details.
API Design and Usability: Another difference lies in the design and usability of their APIs. Puppeteer's API is well-documented and follows the standard Node.js conventions, making it easy to use for developers familiar with Node.js. On the other hand, Chromeless aims for a simpler API syntax with a fluent interface, providing a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. This trade-off between simplicity and control gives users the flexibility to choose according to their preferences and project requirements.
Community and Support: The size and activity of the community around each tool also differ. Puppeteer is an official Google project and benefits from the support of a large community and regular updates from its maintainers. It has a vibrant community, with a dedicated GitHub repository and active discussions on forums. Chromeless, while still actively maintained, has a relatively smaller community base and fewer resources available for support and troubleshooting.
Browser Compatibility: Chromeless is primarily focused on Chrome and headless Chrome, while Puppeteer supports both Chrome and Chromium browsers. This difference in compatibility may be a consideration for developers targeting specific browsers other than Chrome.
Performance and Speed: Another noteworthy difference is in terms of performance and speed. Puppeteer uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol behind the scenes, which enables a higher level of control and optimization. This can result in faster execution and better performance compared to Chromeless.
Advanced Features and Extensibility: Puppeteer offers more advanced features and extensibility options compared to Chromeless. It provides direct DOM manipulation, network interception, and page events handling. Puppeteer's extensive feature set allows for more sophisticated automation scenarios, making it suitable for complex testing or scraping tasks. Chromeless, while still capable, may not provide the same level of flexibility when it comes to advanced usage.

In summary, Chromeless and Puppeteer differ in their approach to headless Chrome support, API design, community and support, browser compatibility, performance and speed, as well as advanced features and extensibility. The choice between the two depends on specific project requirements, familiarity with Node.js, and the need for fine-grained control or simplicity.

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Advice on Chromeless, Puppeteer

Giovanni

Dec 22, 2020

Review

Moving away from Protractor, I would suggest giving Playwright (https://playwright.dev) a quick try, as it seems to have more momentum than Puppeteer at the moment. WebDriverIO is a more mature, higher-level tool, which can also use Puppeteer under the hood, and offers interesting built-in functionality. Depending on the size of your framework, it might be easier to switch to either one of those. I would recommend writing down your key criteria for the decision, then running a short POC with both Playwright and WebDriverIO running against your target application.

2.1k views2.1k

Comments

SchulzDL

Feb 5, 2021

Review

I would recommend two other tools which are both very similar to each other partially because the same core team wrote both of them. One for Google then went over to Microsoft to do something similar. These tools are designed to work at testing modern websites which could be single page applications (SPA)

621 views621

Comments

Ankur

Software Engineer

Dec 4, 2019

Needs advice

I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?

73k views73k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Chromeless	Puppeteer
Chrome automation made simple. Runs locally or headless on AWS Lambda.	Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
Statistics
Stacks 14	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 29	Followers 582
Votes 0	Votes 26
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 10 Scriptable web browser 10 Very well documented 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
Serverless AWS Lambda	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Chromeless, Puppeteer?

Playwright

It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.

HeadlessTesting

Headless Browser Cloud for Developers. Connect your Puppeteer and Playwright scripts to our Cloud. Automated Browser Testing with Puppeteer and Playwright in the Cloud.

jsdom

It is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML Standards, for use with Node.js. In general, the goal of the project is to emulate enough of a subset of a web browser to be useful for testing and scraping real-world web applications.

CasperJS

CasperJS is a browser navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for PhantomJS or SlimerJS.

Splash

It is a headless browser that executes JavaScript for people crawling websites. It is open source and fully integrated with Scrapy and Portia. You can also use its API to integrate with any project that needs to render JavaScript pages.

SlimerJS

It allows you to manipulate a web page with an external Javascript script: opening a webpage, clicking on links, modifying the content... It is useful to do functional tests, page automation, network monitoring, screen capture etc.

Serverless Chrome

The aim of this project is to provide the scaffolding for using Headless Chrome during a serverless function invocation. Serverless Chrome takes care of building and bundling the Chrome binaries and making sure Chrome is running when your serverless function executes. In addition, this project also provides a few "example" handlers for common patterns (e.g. taking a screenshot of a page, printing to PDF, some scraping, etc.)

Related Comparisons

Chromeless vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will provide a comparison between Chromeless and Puppeteer, two popular tools for web automation and testing.

Headless Chrome Support: One key difference between Chromeless and Puppeteer is their approach to headless Chrome support. Chromeless is focused on providing a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome, while Puppeteer is a Node.js library specifically designed to control the Chrome or Chromium browser. This means that Puppeteer offers more fine-grained control and access to Chrome's features, while Chromeless abstracts away some of the low-level details.
API Design and Usability: Another difference lies in the design and usability of their APIs. Puppeteer's API is well-documented and follows the standard Node.js conventions, making it easy to use for developers familiar with Node.js. On the other hand, Chromeless aims for a simpler API syntax with a fluent interface, providing a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. This trade-off between simplicity and control gives users the flexibility to choose according to their preferences and project requirements.
Community and Support: The size and activity of the community around each tool also differ. Puppeteer is an official Google project and benefits from the support of a large community and regular updates from its maintainers. It has a vibrant community, with a dedicated GitHub repository and active discussions on forums. Chromeless, while still actively maintained, has a relatively smaller community base and fewer resources available for support and troubleshooting.
Browser Compatibility: Chromeless is primarily focused on Chrome and headless Chrome, while Puppeteer supports both Chrome and Chromium browsers. This difference in compatibility may be a consideration for developers targeting specific browsers other than Chrome.
Performance and Speed: Another noteworthy difference is in terms of performance and speed. Puppeteer uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol behind the scenes, which enables a higher level of control and optimization. This can result in faster execution and better performance compared to Chromeless.
Advanced Features and Extensibility: Puppeteer offers more advanced features and extensibility options compared to Chromeless. It provides direct DOM manipulation, network interception, and page events handling. Puppeteer's extensive feature set allows for more sophisticated automation scenarios, making it suitable for complex testing or scraping tasks. Chromeless, while still capable, may not provide the same level of flexibility when it comes to advanced usage.

Chromeless vs Puppeteer

Overview

Chromeless vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?