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Puppeteer vs Splash: What are the differences?
Puppeteer: 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; Splash: Headless browser that executes JavaScript for people crawling websites. 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.
Puppeteer and Splash belong to "Headless Browsers" category of the tech stack.
Puppeteer and Splash are both open source tools. It seems that Puppeteer with 54.1K GitHub stars and 5.13K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Splash with 2.6K GitHub stars and 364 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 Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology.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 Puppeteer
- Very well documented10
- Scriptable web browser10
- Promise based6
Pros of Splash
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Cons of Puppeteer
- Chrome only10