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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Testing Frameworks
  4. Headless Browsers
  5. Puppeteer vs Serverless Chrome

Puppeteer vs Serverless Chrome

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Serverless Chrome
Serverless Chrome
Stacks7
Followers25
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.9K
Forks280
Puppeteer
Puppeteer
Stacks1.0K
Followers582
Votes26

Puppeteer vs Serverless Chrome: What are the differences?

Developers describe Puppeteer as "Headless Chrome Node API". 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. On the other hand, Serverless Chrome is detailed as "Headless Chrome on AWS Lambda". 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.).

Puppeteer and Serverless Chrome belong to "Headless Browsers" category of the tech stack.

Puppeteer and Serverless Chrome are both open source tools. Puppeteer with 51.1K GitHub stars and 4.71K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Serverless Chrome with 1.95K GitHub stars and 192 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Serverless Chrome, Puppeteer

Giovanni
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.

2.11k views2.11k
Comments
SchulzDL
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)

622 views622
Comments
Ankur
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?

73.1k views73.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Serverless Chrome
Serverless Chrome
Puppeteer
Puppeteer

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.)

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
GitHub Stars
2.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
280
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
7
Stacks
1.0K
Followers
25
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
Serverless
Yarn
Yarn
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Node.js
Node.js

What are some alternatives to Serverless Chrome, Puppeteer?

Playwright

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

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

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

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

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

Splash

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

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

Chromeless

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

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