CasperJS vs Puppeteer

Overview

CasperJS

Stacks76

Followers120

Votes0

GitHub Stars7.2K

Forks972

Puppeteer

Stacks1.0K

Followers582

Votes26

CasperJS vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Execution Environment: CasperJS is built on top of PhantomJS, a headless browser, while Puppeteer is based on the Node.js library. CasperJS offers more high-level functionalities and automation scripts, whereas Puppeteer provides more control and flexibility in interactions with the browser.
Language Support: CasperJS uses JavaScript as its scripting language, while Puppeteer allows users to leverage the full capabilities of Node.js, including using modern JavaScript features such as async/await. This makes Puppeteer more suitable for developers familiar with JavaScript and Node.js ecosystem.
Community Support: Puppeteer has a larger and more active community compared to CasperJS, which results in more frequent updates, bug fixes, and new features. This community support can be crucial for resolving issues or finding resources when working with the tool.
Headless Mode and Browser Options: Puppeteer natively supports headless mode, offering better control over browser options and configurations, while CasperJS requires additional setup to run in headless mode. This makes Puppeteer a more suitable choice for headless browsing scenarios.
Performance: Puppeteer typically has better performance compared to CasperJS due to its underlying architecture and optimized APIs. This can be crucial when dealing with large-scale automation tasks or performance-sensitive applications that require faster execution times.
Official Support and Documentation: Puppeteer is developed and maintained by Google Chrome team, providing official support and comprehensive documentation, ensuring that users have access to reliable resources and updates. CasperJS, on the other hand, may have less official support and documentation available.

In Summary, CasperJS and Puppeteer differ in their execution environment, language support, community backing, headless mode capabilities, performance, and official support/documentation.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on 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.

2.11k views2.11k

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)

622 views622

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

CasperJS	Puppeteer
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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 7.2K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 972	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 76	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 120	Followers 582
Votes 0	Votes 26
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 10 Scriptable web browser 10 Very well documented 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
PhantomJS	Node.js

What are some alternatives to 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.

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.

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 Puppeteer: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Execution Environment: CasperJS is built on top of PhantomJS, a headless browser, while Puppeteer is based on the Node.js library. CasperJS offers more high-level functionalities and automation scripts, whereas Puppeteer provides more control and flexibility in interactions with the browser.
Language Support: CasperJS uses JavaScript as its scripting language, while Puppeteer allows users to leverage the full capabilities of Node.js, including using modern JavaScript features such as async/await. This makes Puppeteer more suitable for developers familiar with JavaScript and Node.js ecosystem.
Community Support: Puppeteer has a larger and more active community compared to CasperJS, which results in more frequent updates, bug fixes, and new features. This community support can be crucial for resolving issues or finding resources when working with the tool.
Headless Mode and Browser Options: Puppeteer natively supports headless mode, offering better control over browser options and configurations, while CasperJS requires additional setup to run in headless mode. This makes Puppeteer a more suitable choice for headless browsing scenarios.
Performance: Puppeteer typically has better performance compared to CasperJS due to its underlying architecture and optimized APIs. This can be crucial when dealing with large-scale automation tasks or performance-sensitive applications that require faster execution times.
Official Support and Documentation: Puppeteer is developed and maintained by Google Chrome team, providing official support and comprehensive documentation, ensuring that users have access to reliable resources and updates. CasperJS, on the other hand, may have less official support and documentation available.

In Summary, CasperJS and Puppeteer differ in their execution environment, language support, community backing, headless mode capabilities, performance, and official support/documentation.

CasperJS vs Puppeteer

Overview