BrowserStack vs PhantomJS

Overview

BrowserStack

Stacks2.7K

Followers2.0K

Votes533

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

BrowserStack vs PhantomJS: What are the differences?

Developers describe BrowserStack as "Instant access to a lab of 1000+ real mobile and desktop browsers for testing". Live, Web-Based Browser Testing Instant access to all real mobile and desktop browsers. Say goodbye to your lab of devices and virtual machines. On the other hand, PhantomJS is detailed as "Scriptable Headless WebKit". PhantomJS (www.phantomjs.org) is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.

BrowserStack belongs to "Browser Testing" category of the tech stack, while PhantomJS can be primarily classified under "Headless Browsers".

Some of the features offered by BrowserStack are:

Real Device Cloud. Test on a range of physical Android and iOS mobile devices and tablets for the most accurate results
1100+ desktop browsers. Latest versions of IE, Edge, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and more on a range of Windows and OS X platforms on a robust cloud infrastructure
Test dev environments. Our Local Testing feature allows you to test development and internal websites seamlessly, without setup or configuration

On the other hand, PhantomJS provides the following key features:

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.

"Multiple browsers" is the top reason why over 121 developers like BrowserStack, while over 12 developers mention "Scriptable web browser" as the leading cause for choosing PhantomJS.

PhantomJS is an open source tool with 26.9K GitHub stars and 5.7K GitHub forks. Here's a link to PhantomJS's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, BrowserStack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 572 company stacks & 230 developers stacks; compared to PhantomJS, which is listed in 78 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on BrowserStack, PhantomJS

Rinchin

Jul 20, 2020

Needs adviceon

Selenium

Sauce Labs

I am looking to purchase one of these tools for Mobile testing for my team. It should support Native, hybrid, and responsive app testing. It should also feature debugging, parallel execution, automation testing/easy integration with automation testing tools like Selenium, and the capability to provide availability of devices specifically for us to use at any time with good speed of performing all these activities.

I have already used Perfecto mobile, and Sauce Labs in my other projects before. I want to know how different or better is AWS Device farm in usage and how advantageous it would be for us to use it over other mentioned tools

217k views217k

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?

73.1k views73.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

BrowserStack	PhantomJS
BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.	PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.
Get instant access to 20,000+ real mobile devices and browsers, which include real iOS and Android devices, Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari; Test websites hosted on internal dev and staging environments with zero setup or configuration; Run hundreds of tests concurrently to speed up the execution time of your test suite by more than 10x	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 -	GitHub Stars 29.5K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 2.7K	Stacks 1.7K
Followers 2.0K	Followers 430
Votes 533	Votes 18
Pros & Cons
Pros 135 Multiple browsers 76 Ease of use 65 Real browsers 44 Ability to use it locally 27 Good price Cons 2 Very limited choice of minor versions	Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6
Integrations
Cypress QMetry Jira WordPress Shopify Zapier Drone.io Jenkins Slack GitLab	FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux

What are some alternatives to BrowserStack, PhantomJS?

Selenium

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Sauce Labs

Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.

Karma

Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.

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.

Rainforest QA

Rainforest gives you the reliability of a QA team and the speed of automation, without the hassle of managing a team or the pain of writing automated tests.

WebdriverIO

WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read.

Testrail

TestRail helps you manage and track your software testing efforts and organize your QA department. Its intuitive web-based user interface makes it easy to create test cases, manage test runs and coordinate your entire testing process.

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.

TestingBot

TestingBot provides automated and Manual cross browser testing in the cloud. Make sure your website looks ok in all browsers.

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