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Puppeteer vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Puppeteer and Selenium are both popular tools used for automating web browser activities. However, there are key differences between the two that developers should consider when choosing a tool for their automation needs.

  1. Language Support: Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome or Chromium. This means that developers need to have a good understanding of JavaScript to work with Puppeteer effectively. On the other hand, Selenium supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, C#, and Ruby, making it a more versatile choice for developers who are proficient in different programming languages.

  2. Performance: Puppeteer is known for its speed and performance as it directly communicates with the Chrome or Chromium browser via the DevTools Protocol. This results in faster execution of automation scripts compared to Selenium, which relies on the WebDriver protocol to communicate with the browser, leading to slightly slower performance.

  3. Headless Mode: Puppeteer has built-in support for running tests in headless mode, which allows for executing browser automation without a visible browser window. In contrast, Selenium requires additional configurations to run tests in headless mode using tools like PhantomJS or headless browsers provided by the browser vendors.

  4. Size and Dependencies: Puppeteer has a smaller footprint compared to Selenium as it is solely focused on Chrome automation. This makes Puppeteer easier to set up and work with as it has fewer dependencies to manage. Selenium, on the other hand, supports multiple browsers and requires the installation of browser drivers for each browser, leading to a larger setup footprint.

  5. Ecosystem and Community Support: Selenium has been in the market for a longer time and has a larger user base and community support compared to Puppeteer. This means that developers working with Selenium can benefit from a more extensive ecosystem of tools, libraries, and resources available for automation testing.

In Summary, Puppeteer is a lightweight and fast tool for browser automation with good performance and headless mode support, whereas Selenium is a more versatile tool with support for multiple programming languages, larger browser compatibility, and a more extensive ecosystem and community support.

Advice on Puppeteer and Selenium
Needs advice
on
JestJestSeleniumSelenium
and
WebdriverIOWebdriverIO
in

we are having one web application developed in Reacts.js. in the application, we have only 4 to 5 pages that we need to test. I am having experience in selenium with java. Please suggets which tool I should use. and why ............................ ............................ .............................

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Replies (1)
Prashanth Marappa
Senior Software Engineer at Mphasis · | 1 upvotes · 227.9K views
Recommends
on
SeleniumSelenium

with the help of selenium we can automate react js for functional testing

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Ankur Loriya
Needs advice
on
PhantomJSPhantomJS
and
PuppeteerPuppeteer

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?

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
PuppeteerPuppeteer

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.

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Recommends
on
PuppeteerPuppeteer

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.

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Decisions about Puppeteer and Selenium
Matt Wufsus
QA Engineer at Creditly · | 4 upvotes · 17.5K views

My company was looking for a testing tool that would integrate easily with AWS Amplify and quickly provide value. I created a POC for each tool we were exploring and showed it to the team (since we all want to contribute to the testing framework). Cypress was by far the easiest to go from nothing to running tests that were finding bugs in our web application.

The only difficulties I had with Cypress were working with iframes and the fact it does not currently handle new tabs. Cypress currently supports Chrome, Edge, Electron (headless) and has Firefox in beta so if IE is something you need to support, you might want to use another tool in conjunction or in place of Cypress.

Cypress is very well documented with a very responsive support team. Recently the Cypress team released the 'Real World App' as a showcase for implementing good tests with best practices.

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Pros of Puppeteer
Pros of Selenium
  • 10
    Very well documented
  • 10
    Scriptable web browser
  • 6
    Promise based
  • 177
    Automates browsers
  • 154
    Testing
  • 101
    Essential tool for running test automation
  • 24
    Record-Playback
  • 24
    Remote Control
  • 8
    Data crawling
  • 7
    Supports end to end testing
  • 6
    Easy set up
  • 6
    Functional testing
  • 4
    The Most flexible monitoring system
  • 3
    End to End Testing
  • 3
    Easy to integrate with build tools
  • 2
    Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm
  • 2
    Record and playback
  • 2
    Compatible with Python
  • 2
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Integration Tests
  • 0
    Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework

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Cons of Puppeteer
Cons of Selenium
  • 10
    Chrome only
  • 8
    Flaky tests
  • 4
    Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)
  • 2
    Update browser drivers

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What is 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.

What is Selenium?

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

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What companies use Puppeteer?
What companies use Selenium?
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What tools integrate with Puppeteer?
What tools integrate with Selenium?

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What are some alternatives to Puppeteer and Selenium?
Chef
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
Salt
Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.
Puppet Labs
Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Cypress
Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website.
See all alternatives