Difference between Puppeteer and Selenium

In this article, we will discuss the differences between Puppeteer and Selenium. Before going to the differences, let us understand each term.

What is the Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that gives a programmatic high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium via the DevTools Protocol. It was designed by Google Chrome developers and is majorly utilized for Chrome and Chromium web browsers automation. Puppeteer is especially popular in headless browsing, which means a browser without any GUI to interact with, mostly used in such applications as automated testing, data scraping, and performance profiling.

Key Features of Puppeteer:

Several features of puppeteer are as follows:

1. Headless Browser Automation:
   Puppeteer works with Chrome or Chromium in headless mode by default, which means that there is no visible browser window. This makes such processes quicker and require fewer resources to perform than the conventional methods such as automated testing, scrapping web content and converting web pages to PDFs.
2. Full Control Over Chrome DevTools Protocol:
   Puppeteer directly interacts with Chrome DevTools Protocol and offers more sophisticated features like network princes, contexts, and emulation of devices and other networks.
3. Network and Performance Monitoring:
   Puppeteer provides the capability to monitor and control network requests, view performance metrics and many other features, including taking screenshots and PDFs of webpages. It is particularly valuable for performance auditing and optimization work.
4. JavaScript and Node.js Integration:
   With the built-in Node.js library, Puppeteer can be easily plugged into JavaScript-based applications letting developers tap into the Node.js ecosystem packages and tools.
5. User Interaction Simulation:
   Puppeteer is capable of performing left clicks, form submission, and keyboard inputs, which is useful for testing web applications.
6. Screenshots and PDF Generation:
   Puppeteer can take screenshots of web pages at different stages of loading and during user interactions. It can also save web pages as PDFs, which can be useful in reporting and documentation.

Advantages of Puppeteer:

Several advantages of puppeteer are as follows:

1. Simplicity and Ease of Use:
   The Puppeteer API is quite simple, and it uses relatively modern JavaScript syntax, which is rather easy to understand if one is used to Node.js.
2. Fast Execution:
   Puppeteer also launched a headless mode, which has more efficiency than GUI based automation tools of the browsers.
3. Direct Integration with Chrome:
   Chrome is closely integrated with Puppeteer to make sure that Puppeteer follows the current standard and the recent changes of the Chrome browser.

Disadvantages of Puppeteer:

Several disadvantages of puppeteer are as follows:

1. Limited Browser Support:
   Puppeteer currently only works well with the Chrome and Chromium browsers, which makes cross-browser testing difficult at times.
2. Node.js js Dependency:
   Puppeteer is not interoperable with other browsers because it is designed to work closely with Node.js, which can be inconvenient for teams or projects that do not use JavaScript or prefer a different language.
3. Less Mature Ecosystem:
   As for disadvantages, Puppeteer has a relatively young ecosystem, so there are fewer compatible tools and libraries.

What is the Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source automation tool that can be used to automate web browsers. Selenium is used to:

• It enables users to check the functional compatibility of their websites across different browsers.
• Conduct Browser compatibility check to ensure that the website responds similarly across different browse.
• It offers an interface through which we can write test scripts in various programming languages, including Ruby, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript, and C#, among others. Selenium is very extendible and can work hand in hand with other tools and frameworks such as TestNG, JUnit, Cucumber, and among others.

Pros of Selenium

Several pros of Selenium are as follows:

• Selenium is compatible with cross browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and many others, making cross-browser compatibility possible.
• Selenium supports several officially supported programming languages, such as Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and JavaScript, .NET Another Python, C Sharp, and many others making it the right platform for almost any developer.
• Selenium has a wide base of users, which has led to the availability of a lot of resources, guides, and forums, where we can get help on most issues.

Cons of Selenium

Several cons of Selenium are as follows:

• Complex Setup: Compared to Puppeteer, the configuration of Selenium might be more inconvenient because we have to maintain drivers for specific browsers addressed as well as appropriate configurations.
• Slower Execution: When comparing Puppeteer with Selenium, it is found that Selenium makes use of WebDriver, which helps in establishing an additional form of connection between the test script and browser, making it a little slow as compared to Puppeteer.
• Synchronization Issues: One of the major limitations of Selenium is that it has problems with synchronization when the browser behaves inconsistently in terms of response time.

Key differences between Puppeteer and Selenium

There are several key difference between Puppeteer and Selenium. Some main differences between Stream and Buffer are as follows:

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Puppeteer and Selenium are two different tools for browser automation. Puppeteer, which works best with Chromium browsers, is recommended for tasks that demand high speed, Chromium Chrome DevTools integration, and no UI operation or headless browsing, preferably under the Node.js environment. However, it has several limitations like being more compatible with Internet Explorer and other browsers that support JavaScript. On the other hand, Selenium is more flexible because of its capability to support various browsers and languages while being used in testing numerous websites and web applications. On the other hand, Selenium has rich support and medium flexibility but takes more time and resources to set up and may have the risk of slowing down the performance of the browser. The two options differ in their structure, and therefore, the decision between the two has to do with the requirements of the project in question.