Overview

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

Serverless Chrome

Stacks7

Followers25

Votes0

GitHub Stars2.9K

Forks280

PhantomJS vs Serverless Chrome: What are the differences?

# Introduction

PhantomJS and Serverless Chrome are two tools often used for headless browsing and automation tasks. They both have their own unique features and capabilities. Below are the key differences between PhantomJS and Serverless Chrome.

1. **Execution Environment**: PhantomJS is a headless browser implemented as a command-line tool, while Serverless Chrome is a variant of Chromium optimized for running in serverless environments like AWS Lambda.
2. **Maintenance and Updates**: PhantomJS has been deprecated and is no longer actively maintained, whereas Serverless Chrome is kept up to date with the latest version of Chromium and maintained by its developers.
3. **Resource Consumption**: Serverless Chrome scales better in terms of resource consumption when compared to PhantomJS, resulting in more efficient and cost-effective operations in high-demand scenarios.
4. **Integration with Cloud Platforms**: Serverless Chrome is designed to seamlessly integrate with cloud platforms like AWS Lambda, making it easier to deploy and manage in serverless environments compared to PhantomJS.
5. **Advanced features and capabilities**: Serverless Chrome provides access to advanced features and capabilities of the Chromium browser, offering a more modern and robust solution for headless browsing and automation tasks compared to PhantomJS.
6. **Community Support**: Serverless Chrome benefits from a more active community and ongoing development support compared to PhantomJS, ensuring better compatibility and timely bug fixes and updates for users.

In Summary, PhantomJS and Serverless Chrome differ in terms of their execution environment, maintenance status, resource consumption, integration with cloud platforms, advanced features, and community support. Serverless Chrome emerges as a more efficient and modern solution for headless browsing and automation tasks in serverless environments.

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Advice on PhantomJS, Serverless Chrome

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?

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Detailed Comparison

PhantomJS	Serverless Chrome
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.	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.)
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 2.9K
GitHub Forks 5.7K	GitHub Forks 280
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 7
Followers 430	Followers 25
Votes 18	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6	No community feedback yet
Integrations
FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux	Serverless Yarn AWS Lambda

What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, Serverless Chrome?

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.

Puppeteer

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.

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.