PhantomJS vs Selenium

Overview

Selenium

Stacks16.2K

Followers12.6K

Votes527

GitHub Stars33.6K

Forks8.6K

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

PhantomJS vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Key Differences between PhantomJS and Selenium

PhantomJS and Selenium are both popular tools used for web testing and automation. While they serve similar purposes, there are some key differences between the two.

Execution Environment: PhantomJS is a headless browser that can execute JavaScript in an environment without a graphical user interface, making it suitable for server-side testing. On the other hand, Selenium requires a graphical user interface to execute tests and interact with web elements.
Language Support: PhantomJS is primarily based on JavaScript and supports only JavaScript for writing test scripts. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple languages such as Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and more, providing developers with a wider range of options.
Browser Compatibility: Selenium can automate testing across multiple web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. PhantomJS, being a headless browser, does not have the same compatibility and is limited to simulating a specific rendering engine.
Development and Maintenance: Selenium is an open-source project with a large community of contributors, making it well-documented and continuously maintained. PhantomJS, although it was widely used in the past, is no longer actively maintained and has been deprecated in favor of other tools.
Execution Speed: PhantomJS is known for its fast execution speed as it does not require rendering and displaying web pages. This makes it suitable for tasks that require fast processing, such as web scraping. In comparison, Selenium may have a slower execution speed due to its need to interact with actual browser instances.
Visual Testing: Selenium provides better support for visual testing as it can interact with real browser instances and capture screenshots or compare images for visual regression testing. PhantomJS, being headless, does not have the same capabilities for visual testing.

In summary, PhantomJS is a headless browser with fast execution speed, limited browser compatibility, and primarily supports JavaScript. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple languages, has better browser compatibility, supports visual testing, and is continuously maintained by a large community.

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Advice on Selenium, PhantomJS

Shivam

Mar 5, 2020

Needs advice

we are having one web application developed in Reacts.js. in the application, we have only 4 to 5 pages that we need to test. I am having experience in selenium with java. Please suggets which tool I should use. and why ............................ ............................ .............................

241k views241k

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

Selenium	PhantomJS
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.	PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.
-	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 33.6K	GitHub Stars 29.5K
GitHub Forks 8.6K	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 16.2K	Stacks 1.7K
Followers 12.6K	Followers 430
Votes 527	Votes 18
Pros & Cons
Pros 177 Automates browsers 154 Testing 101 Essential tool for running test automation 24 Record-Playback 24 Remote Control Cons 8 Flaky tests 4 Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui) 2 Update browser drivers	Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6
Integrations
No integrations available	FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux

What are some alternatives to Selenium, PhantomJS?

BrowserStack

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.

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.

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.

Ghost Inspector

It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.

Related Comparisons

PhantomJS vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Key Differences between PhantomJS and Selenium

PhantomJS and Selenium are both popular tools used for web testing and automation. While they serve similar purposes, there are some key differences between the two.

Execution Environment: PhantomJS is a headless browser that can execute JavaScript in an environment without a graphical user interface, making it suitable for server-side testing. On the other hand, Selenium requires a graphical user interface to execute tests and interact with web elements.
Language Support: PhantomJS is primarily based on JavaScript and supports only JavaScript for writing test scripts. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple languages such as Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and more, providing developers with a wider range of options.
Browser Compatibility: Selenium can automate testing across multiple web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. PhantomJS, being a headless browser, does not have the same compatibility and is limited to simulating a specific rendering engine.
Development and Maintenance: Selenium is an open-source project with a large community of contributors, making it well-documented and continuously maintained. PhantomJS, although it was widely used in the past, is no longer actively maintained and has been deprecated in favor of other tools.
Execution Speed: PhantomJS is known for its fast execution speed as it does not require rendering and displaying web pages. This makes it suitable for tasks that require fast processing, such as web scraping. In comparison, Selenium may have a slower execution speed due to its need to interact with actual browser instances.
Visual Testing: Selenium provides better support for visual testing as it can interact with real browser instances and capture screenshots or compare images for visual regression testing. PhantomJS, being headless, does not have the same capabilities for visual testing.

PhantomJS vs Selenium

Overview

PhantomJS vs Selenium: What are the differences?