CasperJS vs PhantomJS vs Puppeteer

Overview

PhantomJS

Stacks1.2K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

CasperJS

Stacks63

Followers120

Votes0

GitHub Stars7.2K

Forks972

Puppeteer

Stacks653

Followers582

Votes26

CasperJS vs PhantomJS vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

<PhantomJS, CasperJS, and Puppeteer are all popular headless testing tools used for web automation. Each tool has its unique features and capabilities that differentiate it from the others. In this Markdown code, we will explore the key differences between CasperJS, PhantomJS, and Puppeteer.>

Browser Automation Support: CasperJS runs on top of PhantomJS, which means it uses PhantomJS as its headless browser. On the other hand, Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. This allows Puppeteer to offer better support for the most recent features and updates in the Chrome browser.
Programming Language: CasperJS uses JavaScript and PhantomJS is based on JavaScript as well. Meanwhile, Puppeteer uses Node.js which allows for easier integration with other Node projects and greater flexibility in terms of programming.
Async/Await Support: One major difference between CasperJS and Puppeteer is the support for async/await in Puppeteer. Puppeteer fully supports this modern JavaScript feature, making it easier to write asynchronous code. CasperJS doesn't have this level of support for async/await, which can make coding more challenging.
Speed and Performance: Puppeteer tends to be faster and more efficient compared to CasperJS and PhantomJS. Due to its direct interaction with Chromium/Chrome, Puppeteer can complete tasks more quickly and provide better performance overall.
Community and Support: With Google backing Puppeteer, it has a strong community and active support for bug fixes and updates. CasperJS and PhantomJS, on the other hand, have seen a decline in support and updates, making them less reliable options for long-term projects.
Testing Capabilities: Puppeteer is more focused on testing and browser automation tasks, providing extensive APIs for tasks like taking screenshots, generating PDFs, and emulating different devices and network conditions. CasperJS and PhantomJS, while still capable of these tasks, may not have the same level of functionality or ease of use as Puppeteer.

In Summary, the choice between CasperJS, PhantomJS, and Puppeteer depends on factors such as programming language preference, browser automation support, speed, performance, community, and testing capabilities.

Advice on PhantomJS, CasperJS, Puppeteer

Giovanni

Dec 22, 2020

Review

Moving away from Protractor, I would suggest giving Playwright (https://playwright.dev) a quick try, as it seems to have more momentum than Puppeteer at the moment. WebDriverIO is a more mature, higher-level tool, which can also use Puppeteer under the hood, and offers interesting built-in functionality. Depending on the size of your framework, it might be easier to switch to either one of those. I would recommend writing down your key criteria for the decision, then running a short POC with both Playwright and WebDriverIO running against your target application.

2.1k views2.1k

Comments

SchulzDL

Feb 5, 2021

Review

I would recommend two other tools which are both very similar to each other partially because the same core team wrote both of them. One for Google then went over to Microsoft to do something similar. These tools are designed to work at testing modern websites which could be single page applications (SPA)

619 views619

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

PhantomJS	CasperJS	Puppeteer
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.	CasperJS is a browser navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for PhantomJS or SlimerJS.	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 7.2K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.7K	GitHub Forks 972	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 63	Stacks 653
Followers 430	Followers 120	Followers 582
Votes 18	Votes 0	Votes 26
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6	No community feedback yet	Pros 10 Scriptable web browser 10 Very well documented 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux	No integrations available	Node.js

What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, CasperJS, 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.

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

Chrome automation made simple. Runs locally or headless on AWS Lambda.

Serverless Chrome

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.)

Related Comparisons

CasperJS vs PhantomJS vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Browser Automation Support: CasperJS runs on top of PhantomJS, which means it uses PhantomJS as its headless browser. On the other hand, Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. This allows Puppeteer to offer better support for the most recent features and updates in the Chrome browser.
Programming Language: CasperJS uses JavaScript and PhantomJS is based on JavaScript as well. Meanwhile, Puppeteer uses Node.js which allows for easier integration with other Node projects and greater flexibility in terms of programming.
Async/Await Support: One major difference between CasperJS and Puppeteer is the support for async/await in Puppeteer. Puppeteer fully supports this modern JavaScript feature, making it easier to write asynchronous code. CasperJS doesn't have this level of support for async/await, which can make coding more challenging.
Speed and Performance: Puppeteer tends to be faster and more efficient compared to CasperJS and PhantomJS. Due to its direct interaction with Chromium/Chrome, Puppeteer can complete tasks more quickly and provide better performance overall.
Community and Support: With Google backing Puppeteer, it has a strong community and active support for bug fixes and updates. CasperJS and PhantomJS, on the other hand, have seen a decline in support and updates, making them less reliable options for long-term projects.
Testing Capabilities: Puppeteer is more focused on testing and browser automation tasks, providing extensive APIs for tasks like taking screenshots, generating PDFs, and emulating different devices and network conditions. CasperJS and PhantomJS, while still capable of these tasks, may not have the same level of functionality or ease of use as Puppeteer.

CasperJS vs PhantomJS vs Puppeteer

Overview

CasperJS vs PhantomJS vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Advice on PhantomJS, CasperJS, Puppeteer

Detailed Comparison