What is Chromeless and what are its top alternatives?
Chromeless is a headless browser automation tool that allows users to run full Chromium or Firefox browser instances and interact with the web. It provides a simple API for controlling browsers and provides features for testing, scraping, and automating tasks on the web. However, Chromeless has limitations such as limited community support and documentation, as well as potential performance issues when running multiple instances.
- Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Key features include browser automation, web scraping, and testing. Pros: well-documented, active community, good performance. Cons: limited support for Firefox, can be resource-intensive.
- Playwright: Playwright is a cross-browser automation tool that allows users to automate tasks in Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit. Key features include recording browser actions, mocking network requests, and testing in multiple browsers. Pros: multi-browser support, cutting-edge features. Cons: newer than other tools, may have some bugs.
- Selenium: Selenium is a popular automation tool for controlling web browsers. It supports multiple programming languages and browsers, making it a versatile choice for testing and automation. Pros: wide browser support, mature tool with a large user base. Cons: can be complex for beginners, slower performance compared to newer tools.
- Cypress: Cypress is a front-end testing tool that provides a fast and reliable way to write automated tests. Key features include real-time reloads, automatic waiting, and network stubbing. Pros: easy to set up, great for testing web applications. Cons: limited to testing in Chrome, can be less suitable for web scraping tasks.
- TestCafe: TestCafe is a Node.js tool for automating end-to-end web testing. It provides automatic waiting, smart assertions, and browser support for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Pros: easy setup, built-in test runner, multi-browser support. Cons: limited community support, may require additional plugins for some advanced features.
- WebdriverIO: WebdriverIO is a JavaScript testing framework that provides a variety of services for automation. It supports multiple testing frameworks and has integrations with other tools like Appium. Pros: scalable, supports multiple browsers and devices. Cons: steep learning curve, may require more setup compared to other tools.
- Nightwatch.js: Nightwatch.js is an automated testing tool for web applications and websites. It uses Selenium WebDriver API for performing commands and assertions. Pros: simple syntax, supports BDD-style testing. Cons: limited browser support, may have slower performance compared to other tools.
- Taiko: Taiko is a free and open-source browser automation tool built on top of the WebKit engine. It provides a simple and expressive API for writing tests and automating browser interactions. Pros: easy to learn, readable test scripts. Cons: limited to WebKit browser, may have fewer features compared to other tools.
- CodeceptJS: CodeceptJS is a testing framework that allows users to write tests in a simple and readable way using Actor pattern. It supports various automation libraries like WebDriver and Playwright. Pros: versatile, supports multiple libraries. Cons: can be complex for beginners, may require additional setup for some features.
- Happo: Happo is a visual regression testing tool that helps developers catch visual UI changes. It integrates with CI tools and provides a dashboard to review and approve visual changes. Pros: focused on visual testing, easy integration with existing workflows. Cons: may not be suitable for all types of automation tasks, limited to visual testing capabilities.
Top Alternatives to Chromeless
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
Chromeless alternatives & related posts
- Scriptable web browser13
- Depends on QT3
- No ECMAScript 62
related PhantomJS posts
We use CasperJS because we adopted it back in 2013 for JavaScript frontend testing. It was a really nice system back then compared to what else was out there; you had PhantomJS as a programmable browser that actually rendered CSS and everything, it was really fast (speed is a big downside of e.g. Selenium), and it was possible to make non-flaky frontend integration tests with it.
I wouldn't recommend it today, because PhantomJS is a basically dead project, and as a result, so is CasperJS. I expect we'll migrate to something else. We haven't in large part because 95% of our new tests are written with a simple Node.js-based unit testing framework we use that run 35K lines of unit tests covering most of our JS codebase in 3.6 seconds. And for the things where we want an integration test, CasperJS does work, and I think there's a good chance that waiting another year or two will result in our being able to switch to a much better option than what we'd get if we migrated now.
- Automates browsers175
- Testing154
- Essential tool for running test automation101
- Record-Playback24
- Remote Control24
- Data crawling8
- Supports end to end testing7
- Easy set up6
- Functional testing6
- The Most flexible monitoring system4
- End to End Testing3
- Easy to integrate with build tools3
- Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm2
- Record and playback2
- Compatible with Python2
- Easy to scale2
- Integration Tests2
- Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework0
- Flaky tests8
- Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)4
- Update browser drivers2
related Selenium posts
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.
For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL
With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.
- Very well documented10
- Scriptable web browser10
- Promise based6
- Chrome only10
related Puppeteer posts
Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!
I work in a company building web apps with AngularJS. I started using Selenium for tests automation, as I am more familiar with Python. However, I found some difficulties, like the impossibility of using IDs and fixed lists of classes, ending up with using xpaths most, which unfortunately could change with fixes and modifications in the code.
So, I started using Puppeteer, but I am still learning. It seems easier to find elements on the webpage, even if the creation and managing of arrays of elements seem to be a little bit more complicated than in Selenium, but it could be also due to my poor knowledge of JavaScript.
Any comments on this comparison and also on comparisons with similar tools are welcome! :)
jsdom
- Lightweight1
related jsdom posts
Playwright
- Cross browser13
- Open source10
- Test Runner with Playwright/test9
- Promise based7
- Well documented7
- Integrate your POMs as extensible fixtures5
- Execute tests in parallel5
- API Testing5
- Python Support4
- Capture videos, screenshots and other artifacts on fail4
- Inbuild reporters html,line,dot,json3
- Context isolation3
- Fastest1
- Less help12
- Node based3
- Does not execute outside of browser2
related Playwright posts
Test automation - Puppeteer is used currently, just rudimentary stuff, but considering the better choices with Playwright?
We are planning to automate our test cases for the application written in AngularJS. Which tool would you suggest we use for automation, Playwright or WebdriverIO?
related CasperJS posts
We use CasperJS because we adopted it back in 2013 for JavaScript frontend testing. It was a really nice system back then compared to what else was out there; you had PhantomJS as a programmable browser that actually rendered CSS and everything, it was really fast (speed is a big downside of e.g. Selenium), and it was possible to make non-flaky frontend integration tests with it.
I wouldn't recommend it today, because PhantomJS is a basically dead project, and as a result, so is CasperJS. I expect we'll migrate to something else. We haven't in large part because 95% of our new tests are written with a simple Node.js-based unit testing framework we use that run 35K lines of unit tests covering most of our JS codebase in 3.6 seconds. And for the things where we want an integration test, CasperJS does work, and I think there's a good chance that waiting another year or two will result in our being able to switch to a much better option than what we'd get if we migrated now.