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Puppeteer vs Playwright: What are the differences?
Developers describe Puppeteer as "Headless Chrome Node API". 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. On the other hand, Playwright is detailed as "Node library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API (By Microsoft)". 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 and Playwright are primarily classified as "Headless Browsers" and "Browser Testing" tools respectively.
Puppeteer and Playwright are both open source tools. It seems that Puppeteer with 59.9K GitHub stars and 6.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Playwright with 10.9K GitHub stars and 282 GitHub forks.
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 Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology.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 Playwright
- Cross browser13
- Open source10
- Test Runner with Playwright/test9
- Well documented7
- Promise based7
- Execute tests in parallel5
- API Testing5
- Integrate your POMs as extensible fixtures5
- Python Support4
- Capture videos, screenshots and other artifacts on fail4
- Context isolation3
- Inbuild reporters html,line,dot,json3
- Fastest1
Pros of Puppeteer
- Very well documented10
- Scriptable web browser10
- Promise based6
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Cons of Playwright
- Less help12
- Node based3
- Does not execute outside of browser2
Cons of Puppeteer
- Chrome only10