PhantomJS vs Puppeteer vs Serverless Chrome
Overview
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CLI (Node.js)
Manual
Detailed Comparison
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.) | 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 2.9K | GitHub Stars - |
GitHub Forks 5.7K | GitHub Forks 280 | GitHub Forks - |
Stacks 1.7K | Stacks 7 | Stacks 1.0K |
Followers 430 | Followers 25 | Followers 582 |
Votes 18 | Votes 0 | Votes 26 |
Pros & Cons | ||
Pros
| No community feedback yet | Pros
Cons
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Integrations | ||
What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, Serverless Chrome, 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.
PageBolt.dev
Browser Automation and Narrated Video Capture API with CI integration. Push a PR or use the MCP server. PageBolt generates a narrated video demo of your changes and posts it to your PR comment. Plus screenshots, PDFs, OG images, and browser automation — all via one API. Free to start.
Armada
Armada is an orchestration platform for running bots and scrapers at scale on Kubernetes. You write a Python script (Playwright, Selenium, or nodriver), add a JSON config, and Armada handles the rest : distributing jobs across as many pods as you need, rotating proxies, managing browser fingerprints, and monitoring everything in real time through a dashboard. Going from 1 worker to 100+ requires zero code changes. No SaaS, no credits, fully self-hosted.
Screenshot Scout
Screenshot Scout is a managed screenshot API that captures clean, production-ready screenshots of any URL with a single HTTP request. It removes clutter like cookie banners, chat widgets, and ads, and supports device emulation, custom viewports, full-page or element capture, and pre-capture controls like clicks or custom CSS or JS.
Geekflare API
Developer-friendly API to scrape websites and get content in HTML, JSON, or markdown for AI apps and agents.
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.
