PhantomJS vs Splash

Overview

PhantomJS

Stacks1.7K

Followers430

Votes18

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks5.7K

Splash

Stacks29

Followers36

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.2K

Forks516

PhantomJS vs Splash: What are the differences?

1. Execution environment: PhantomJS is a headless browser that runs on the user's machine, while Splash is a JavaScript rendering service that is accessed through an HTTP API. This means that PhantomJS requires installation and setup on the user's system, while Splash can be accessed remotely.
2. Rendering Engine: PhantomJS uses WebKit as its rendering engine, which is the same engine used by popular browsers like Google Chrome and Safari. On the other hand, Splash uses Splash, which is a lightweight rendering engine specifically designed for web scraping and automation tasks. Splash's rendering engine is more optimized for handling complex web pages and JavaScript execution.
3. JavaScript Execution: PhantomJS has full support for executing and interacting with JavaScript on web pages, allowing for dynamic scraping and automation. Splash also supports JavaScript execution but provides more control over its execution, allowing users to set timeouts, disable or enable JavaScript, and inject custom scripts.
4. Network Requests: PhantomJS can handle network requests directly without the need for additional configuration. Splash, on the other hand, allows users to customize network requests by intercepting and modifying them using Lua scripting. This gives users more control over the scraping process, allowing them to handle cookies, headers, and other network-related tasks.
5. User Interface: PhantomJS provides a command-line interface for executing scripts and a remote debugging interface for debugging and inspecting web pages. Splash, on the other hand, does not have a user interface but provides an HTTP API that allows users to send requests and receive responses programmatically.
6. Community and Development: PhantomJS has a large and active community of users and contributors, with regular updates and bug fixes. However, since the announcement of its discontinuation in 2017, the development of PhantomJS has slowed down. Splash, on the other hand, is an open-source project maintained by the Scrapinghub team, with regular updates and improvements.

In Summary, PhantomJS is a headless browser that runs on the user's machine and uses WebKit as its rendering engine, while Splash is a JavaScript rendering service accessed through an HTTP API with its own lightweight rendering engine. PhantomJS has full JavaScript execution support and a user interface, while Splash provides more control over rendering, network requests, and a programmatic API.

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Advice on PhantomJS, Splash

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

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Detailed Comparison

PhantomJS	Splash
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.	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.
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	Executes and renders JavaScript to scrape dynamic content; Its HTTP API receives URLs and responses with HTML contents
Statistics
GitHub Stars 29.5K	GitHub Stars 4.2K
GitHub Forks 5.7K	GitHub Forks 516
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 29
Followers 430	Followers 36
Votes 18	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Scriptable web browser 3 Depends on QT 2 No ECMAScript 6	No community feedback yet
Integrations
FreeBSD macOS Windows Linux	JavaScript Linux Scrapy Python Ubuntu Mac OS X

What are some alternatives to PhantomJS, Splash?

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.

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.

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.

CasperJS

CasperJS is a browser navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for PhantomJS or SlimerJS.

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

PhantomJS vs Splash: What are the differences?

1. Execution environment: PhantomJS is a headless browser that runs on the user's machine, while Splash is a JavaScript rendering service that is accessed through an HTTP API. This means that PhantomJS requires installation and setup on the user's system, while Splash can be accessed remotely.
2. Rendering Engine: PhantomJS uses WebKit as its rendering engine, which is the same engine used by popular browsers like Google Chrome and Safari. On the other hand, Splash uses Splash, which is a lightweight rendering engine specifically designed for web scraping and automation tasks. Splash's rendering engine is more optimized for handling complex web pages and JavaScript execution.
3. JavaScript Execution: PhantomJS has full support for executing and interacting with JavaScript on web pages, allowing for dynamic scraping and automation. Splash also supports JavaScript execution but provides more control over its execution, allowing users to set timeouts, disable or enable JavaScript, and inject custom scripts.
4. Network Requests: PhantomJS can handle network requests directly without the need for additional configuration. Splash, on the other hand, allows users to customize network requests by intercepting and modifying them using Lua scripting. This gives users more control over the scraping process, allowing them to handle cookies, headers, and other network-related tasks.
5. User Interface: PhantomJS provides a command-line interface for executing scripts and a remote debugging interface for debugging and inspecting web pages. Splash, on the other hand, does not have a user interface but provides an HTTP API that allows users to send requests and receive responses programmatically.
6. Community and Development: PhantomJS has a large and active community of users and contributors, with regular updates and bug fixes. However, since the announcement of its discontinuation in 2017, the development of PhantomJS has slowed down. Splash, on the other hand, is an open-source project maintained by the Scrapinghub team, with regular updates and improvements.

PhantomJS vs Splash

Overview