Overview

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

CasperJS

Stacks76

Followers120

Votes0

GitHub Stars7.2K

Forks972

CasperJS vs PhantomJS: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between CasperJS and PhantomJS. Both CasperJS and PhantomJS are popular headless browser automation tools that are widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other web development tasks. While they serve similar purposes, there are significant differences between the two.

Execution Environment: CasperJS is built on top of PhantomJS and provides a higher-level API for interacting with the underlying PhantomJS engine. It adds additional features and simplifies the process of web automation. PhantomJS, on the other hand, is a standalone headless browser that can be used directly without the need for an additional framework like CasperJS.
API and Syntax: CasperJS offers a more powerful and expressive API compared to PhantomJS. It includes a rich set of functions and methods specifically designed for web automation tasks. The CasperJS API is simpler to use and offers a higher level of abstraction, making it easier for developers to write automated scripts. PhantomJS provides a lower-level API that requires more coding and a deeper understanding of web technologies.
Functionality: CasperJS provides built-in features like automatic form submission, DOM manipulation, and screenshots, which are not available out-of-the-box in PhantomJS. These additional functionalities help in simplifying the common web automation tasks. PhantomJS, being a lower-level tool, requires manual implementation for such functionalities.
Testing Capabilities: CasperJS has more advanced testing capabilities compared to PhantomJS. It provides a built-in testing framework that allows developers to write test cases and assertions. CasperJS provides a more structured and organized approach to web testing, making it easier to write, maintain, and execute test scripts. PhantomJS, being more focused on web automation, does not offer the same level of testing features.
Compatibility and Support: PhantomJS is a mature and widely used tool that has been around for a longer time compared to CasperJS. It has a larger community and more extensive documentation available. PhantomJS also supports a wider range of platforms and operating systems. CasperJS, being a wrapper around PhantomJS, inherits its compatibility and support.
Maintenance and Updates: CasperJS is actively maintained and updated, with new features and bug fixes being regularly released. PhantomJS, however, is no longer actively maintained and the official development has been discontinued. While it is still functional and usable, there are no new updates or bug fixes being released, which may pose potential issues in the long run.

In Summary, CasperJS offers a higher-level API, additional functionalities, advanced testing capabilities, and better support compared to PhantomJS. Although PhantomJS is standalone and has broader compatibility, it lacks some of the features and convenience provided by CasperJS.

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Advice on PhantomJS, CasperJS

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

PhantomJS	CasperJS
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.	CasperJS is a browser navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for PhantomJS or SlimerJS.
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 7.2K
GitHub Forks 5.7K	GitHub Forks 972
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 76
Followers 430	Followers 120
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	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, CasperJS?

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.

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.)