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CasperJS vs PhantomJS: What are the differences?
What is CasperJS? Navigation scripting & testing for PhantomJS and SlimerJS. CasperJS is a browser navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for PhantomJS or SlimerJS.
What is PhantomJS? Scriptable Headless WebKit. PhantomJS (www.phantomjs.org) is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.
CasperJS and PhantomJS belong to "Headless Browsers" category of the tech stack.
CasperJS and PhantomJS are both open source tools. It seems that PhantomJS with 26.9K GitHub stars and 5.7K forks on GitHub has more adoption than CasperJS with 7.3K GitHub stars and 1.06K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, PhantomJS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 77 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to CasperJS, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.
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?
You better go with puppeteer. It is basically chrome automation tool, written in nodejs. So what you get is PDF, generated by chrome itself. I guess there is hardly better PDF generation tool for the web. Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology. It uses some old webkit port that's quite behind in terms of standards and features. It can be replaced with puppeteer for every single task.
I suggest puppeteer to go for. It is simple and easy to set up. Only limitaiton is it can be used only for chrome browser and currently they are looking into expanding into FF. The next thing is Playwright which is just a scale up of Puppeteer. It supports cross browsers.
Pros of CasperJS
Pros of PhantomJS
- Scriptable web browser13
- Depends on QT3
- No ECMAScript 62