Selenium vs Splash

Overview

Selenium

Stacks16.2K

Followers12.6K

Votes527

GitHub Stars33.6K

Forks8.6K

Splash

Stacks29

Followers36

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.2K

Forks516

Selenium vs Splash: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Selenium and Splash. Both Selenium and Splash are web scraping tools, but they have distinct features and use cases. Understanding these differences can help developers choose the most appropriate tool for their specific requirements.

Support for JavaScript Execution: Selenium is primarily used for automating web browsers and supports JavaScript execution out-of-the-box. It can interact with dynamic web pages and execute JavaScript functions. On the other hand, Splash is a rendering service that can handle JavaScript, but it requires additional setup and configuration to enable JavaScript execution.
Rendering Approach: Selenium uses a real browser to render web pages. It can interact with the rendered page in the same way a user would. This allows for accurate testing and automation of complex user interactions. In contrast, Splash uses its own rendering engine based on the Qt framework. It provides a headless browser-like environment for web scraping, but its rendering may not always be identical to real browsers.
Performance: Selenium can be slower compared to Splash due to its use of a real browser. By interacting with a browser, Selenium incurs the overhead of network communication and page rendering. On the other hand, Splash can be faster as it separates rendering and scraping tasks. It can pre-render pages or render them in a background thread, improving performance for scraping purposes.
Ease of Setup: Selenium requires the installation of browser drivers for different browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, to work with them. This can introduce complexities while setting up the environment. In contrast, Splash is relatively easy to set up since it is a standalone service and doesn't require any specific browser installations.
Supported Programming Languages: Selenium is compatible with a wide range of programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, and more. Developers can use their preferred language to interact with Selenium. On the other hand, Splash provides an HTTP API, which allows developers to interact with it using any programming language capable of making HTTP requests.
Community and Documentation: Selenium has a large and active community of users, resulting in extensive documentation, tutorials, and libraries available for different programming languages. Splash, being a comparatively newer tool, has a smaller community and fewer resources available. This may make it slightly more challenging to find comprehensive documentation and support for specific use cases.

In summary, Selenium provides comprehensive browser automation capabilities with JavaScript execution support, while Splash focuses on providing a headless rendering service with improved performance. The choice between the two tools depends on the specific needs of the project, including the level of JavaScript interaction required and the desired performance trade-offs.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Selenium, Splash

Shivam

Mar 5, 2020

Needs advice

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 ............................ ............................ .............................

241k views241k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Selenium	Splash
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.	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.
-	Executes and renders JavaScript to scrape dynamic content; Its HTTP API receives URLs and responses with HTML contents
Statistics
GitHub Stars 33.6K	GitHub Stars 4.2K
GitHub Forks 8.6K	GitHub Forks 516
Stacks 16.2K	Stacks 29
Followers 12.6K	Followers 36
Votes 527	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 177 Automates browsers 154 Testing 101 Essential tool for running test automation 24 Record-Playback 24 Remote Control Cons 8 Flaky tests 4 Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui) 2 Update browser drivers	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	JavaScript Linux Scrapy Python Ubuntu Mac OS X

What are some alternatives to Selenium, Splash?

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.

Sauce Labs

Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.

Karma

Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.

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.

Rainforest QA

Rainforest gives you the reliability of a QA team and the speed of automation, without the hassle of managing a team or the pain of writing automated tests.

WebdriverIO

WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read.

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.

TestingBot

TestingBot provides automated and Manual cross browser testing in the cloud. Make sure your website looks ok in all browsers.

Ghost Inspector

It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.

Related Comparisons

Selenium vs Splash: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Support for JavaScript Execution: Selenium is primarily used for automating web browsers and supports JavaScript execution out-of-the-box. It can interact with dynamic web pages and execute JavaScript functions. On the other hand, Splash is a rendering service that can handle JavaScript, but it requires additional setup and configuration to enable JavaScript execution.
Rendering Approach: Selenium uses a real browser to render web pages. It can interact with the rendered page in the same way a user would. This allows for accurate testing and automation of complex user interactions. In contrast, Splash uses its own rendering engine based on the Qt framework. It provides a headless browser-like environment for web scraping, but its rendering may not always be identical to real browsers.
Performance: Selenium can be slower compared to Splash due to its use of a real browser. By interacting with a browser, Selenium incurs the overhead of network communication and page rendering. On the other hand, Splash can be faster as it separates rendering and scraping tasks. It can pre-render pages or render them in a background thread, improving performance for scraping purposes.
Ease of Setup: Selenium requires the installation of browser drivers for different browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, to work with them. This can introduce complexities while setting up the environment. In contrast, Splash is relatively easy to set up since it is a standalone service and doesn't require any specific browser installations.
Supported Programming Languages: Selenium is compatible with a wide range of programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, and more. Developers can use their preferred language to interact with Selenium. On the other hand, Splash provides an HTTP API, which allows developers to interact with it using any programming language capable of making HTTP requests.
Community and Documentation: Selenium has a large and active community of users, resulting in extensive documentation, tutorials, and libraries available for different programming languages. Splash, being a comparatively newer tool, has a smaller community and fewer resources available. This may make it slightly more challenging to find comprehensive documentation and support for specific use cases.

Selenium vs Splash

Overview