Puppeteer vs Selenium

Overview

Selenium

Stacks16.2K

Followers12.6K

Votes527

GitHub Stars33.6K

Forks8.6K

Puppeteer

Stacks1.0K

Followers582

Votes26

Puppeteer vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Puppeteer and Selenium are both popular tools used for automating web browser activities. However, there are key differences between the two that developers should consider when choosing a tool for their automation needs.

Language Support: Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome or Chromium. This means that developers need to have a good understanding of JavaScript to work with Puppeteer effectively. On the other hand, Selenium supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, C#, and Ruby, making it a more versatile choice for developers who are proficient in different programming languages.
Performance: Puppeteer is known for its speed and performance as it directly communicates with the Chrome or Chromium browser via the DevTools Protocol. This results in faster execution of automation scripts compared to Selenium, which relies on the WebDriver protocol to communicate with the browser, leading to slightly slower performance.
Headless Mode: Puppeteer has built-in support for running tests in headless mode, which allows for executing browser automation without a visible browser window. In contrast, Selenium requires additional configurations to run tests in headless mode using tools like PhantomJS or headless browsers provided by the browser vendors.
Size and Dependencies: Puppeteer has a smaller footprint compared to Selenium as it is solely focused on Chrome automation. This makes Puppeteer easier to set up and work with as it has fewer dependencies to manage. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple browsers and requires the installation of browser drivers for each browser, leading to a larger setup footprint.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Selenium has been in the market for a longer time and has a larger user base and community support compared to Puppeteer. This means that developers working with Selenium can benefit from a more extensive ecosystem of tools, libraries, and resources available for automation testing.

In Summary, Puppeteer is a lightweight and fast tool for browser automation with good performance and headless mode support, whereas Selenium is a more versatile tool with support for multiple programming languages, larger browser compatibility, and a more extensive ecosystem and community support.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Selenium, Puppeteer

Matt

QA Engineer at Creditly

Jul 17, 2020

Decided

My company was looking for a testing tool that would integrate easily with AWS Amplify and quickly provide value. I created a POC for each tool we were exploring and showed it to the team (since we all want to contribute to the testing framework). Cypress was by far the easiest to go from nothing to running tests that were finding bugs in our web application.

The only difficulties I had with Cypress were working with iframes and the fact it does not currently handle new tabs. Cypress currently supports Chrome, Edge, Electron (headless) and has Firefox in beta so if IE is something you need to support, you might want to use another tool in conjunction or in place of Cypress.

Cypress is very well documented with a very responsive support team. Recently the Cypress team released the 'Real World App' as a showcase for implementing good tests with best practices.

17.7k views17.7k

Comments

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?

73k views73k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Selenium	Puppeteer
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.	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 33.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 8.6K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 16.2K	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 12.6K	Followers 582
Votes 527	Votes 26
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 10 Very well documented 10 Scriptable web browser 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Selenium, Puppeteer?

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Puppeteer vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Language Support: Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome or Chromium. This means that developers need to have a good understanding of JavaScript to work with Puppeteer effectively. On the other hand, Selenium supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, C#, and Ruby, making it a more versatile choice for developers who are proficient in different programming languages.
Performance: Puppeteer is known for its speed and performance as it directly communicates with the Chrome or Chromium browser via the DevTools Protocol. This results in faster execution of automation scripts compared to Selenium, which relies on the WebDriver protocol to communicate with the browser, leading to slightly slower performance.
Headless Mode: Puppeteer has built-in support for running tests in headless mode, which allows for executing browser automation without a visible browser window. In contrast, Selenium requires additional configurations to run tests in headless mode using tools like PhantomJS or headless browsers provided by the browser vendors.
Size and Dependencies: Puppeteer has a smaller footprint compared to Selenium as it is solely focused on Chrome automation. This makes Puppeteer easier to set up and work with as it has fewer dependencies to manage. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple browsers and requires the installation of browser drivers for each browser, leading to a larger setup footprint.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Selenium has been in the market for a longer time and has a larger user base and community support compared to Puppeteer. This means that developers working with Selenium can benefit from a more extensive ecosystem of tools, libraries, and resources available for automation testing.

Puppeteer vs Selenium

Overview