Overview

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

Puppeteer

Stacks1.0K

Followers582

Votes26

PhantomJS vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare PhantomJS and Puppeteer, two popular tools for automating web browser interactions. We will highlight the key differences between these two tools and examine their unique features and strengths.

Execution environment: PhantomJS is a headless browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine, while Puppeteer is a library developed by Google that controls headless Chrome or Chrome in a full browser mode. This difference in execution environment affects the way scripts are run and the compatibility with different browser features.
Maintenance and support: PhantomJS is no longer actively maintained since it entered an "un-maintained" status in March 2018. Puppeteer, on the other hand, is actively maintained by the Chrome team and continuously developed with new features and updates. This ensures that Puppeteer users can benefit from ongoing improvements and bug fixes.
API and functionality: PhantomJS provides a simple and straightforward API for automating browser interactions, but its functionality is limited compared to Puppeteer. Puppeteer offers a more extensive and powerful API, allowing users to do more advanced tasks such as handling Chrome DevTools Protocol, accessing network activity, and fine-grained control over the browser.
Debugging capabilities: Puppeteer provides better debugging capabilities compared to PhantomJS. With Puppeteer, you can easily debug your code using the Chrome DevTools interface, inspect DOM elements, set breakpoints, and analyze network traffic. Such debugging features are not available or more limited in PhantomJS.
Community and resources: Puppeteer has a larger user community and more available online resources compared to PhantomJS. This means there are more tutorials, sample codes, and support forums available for Puppeteer users, making it easier to find help and solve issues when using Puppeteer.
Integration with other tools and frameworks: Puppeteer has better integration with other tools and frameworks, especially in the Node.js ecosystem. It can be easily combined with testing frameworks like Jest or Mocha, headless testing libraries like Playwright, and various other JavaScript libraries. PhantomJS, being an older tool, may have limitations or compatibility issues with newer frameworks and libraries.

Summary

In summary, the key differences between PhantomJS and Puppeteer lie in their execution environment, maintenance and support, API and functionality, debugging capabilities, community and resources, and integration with other tools and frameworks. Puppeteer offers a more modern and feature-rich experience with better support and extensive functionality, making it a preferred choice for automating web browser interactions.

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Advice on PhantomJS, 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

PhantomJS	Puppeteer
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.	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.
Multiplatform, available on major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unices; Fast and native implementation of web standards: DOM, CSS, JavaScript, Canvas, and SVG. No emulation; Pure headless (no X11) on Linux, ideal for continuous integration systems. Also runs on Amazon EC2, Heroku, and Iron.io; Easy to install: Download, unpack, and start having fun in just 5 minutes	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 29.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 430	Followers 582
Votes 18	Votes 26
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6	Pros 10 Scriptable web browser 10 Very well documented 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux	Node.js

What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, 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.

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.

Chromeless

Chrome automation made simple. Runs locally or headless on AWS Lambda.

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.)