Top 8 Puppeteer Alternatives List for Testing Experts

You’ve hit a dead-end using Puppeteer as your web-automation module. Well, you’ll be glad to know that many people like you are looking for better alternatives.

Puppeteer has been famous ever since Google introduced it. Since the Chrome DevTools team is responsible for developing this module, it works seamlessly with a headless Chrome browser without any issues. 

However, in certain cases, Puppeteer requires a lot of extensive manual coding as opposed to other alternatives that provide quick and easy one-tap solutions.

Today, we will be looking into some of the best Puppeteer alternatives on the web. We have compared each alternative with Puppeteer to give you a better idea.

What is Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Google-built Node.js library. It offers a high-level API that can be configured to manage headless Chrome or Chromium browsers over the DevTools Protocol. It is ideal for automated testing, rendering web pages, and web scraping. 

What are Puppeteer’s features?

Its primary features include:

• Puppeteer can run in headless mode, which means it works without a GUI. This helps it run tests faster, especially in server environments. 
• It enables programmatic interactions with web pages which can be used to click buttons, fill forms, and navigate pages. 
• Users can capture screenshots of web pages and generate PDFs from HTML content on the page. 
• Ideal for automating tests of web applications, as the tool can simulate user actions and behavior on these apps.
• Users can intercept and modify network requests to test how the app responds in different scenarios. 
• Supports essential web features like Service Workers, WebSocket, and the latest JavaScript features.
• The tool is easy to use and intuitive for new users. 
• It is compatible with different operating systems since it uses Node.js to work. 
• The pages can analyze page load times to optimize for the best UX.

Top 8 Puppeteer Alternatives

1. Testsigma

Testsigma is a GenAI-powered no-code automation testing platform that enables testers to automate web, mobile, API, SAP, desktop, and Salesforce testing in one place. Testers can create automated tests in plain English using NLP, Recorder, or Copilot. Testsigma Copilot is a GenAI test assistant for QA teams for automated test cases and scenario suggestions in seconds.

Testsigma vs Puppeteer

• Testsigma is a codeless automation tool, but Puppeteer is a Javascript library. You need strong coding expertise to work on Puppeteer, but you don’t need it for Testsigma.
• Puppeteer offers extensive capabilities only for Chromium-based browsers. On the other hand, Testsigma offers capabilities for a comprehensive suite of mobile, web, desktop, and API testing. 
• Testsigma supports parallel testing, but Puppeteer does not.
• Also, Testsigma supports self-healing tests with AI-powered automation. Puppeteer does not have AI capabilities but supports web scraping.

Our experience using Testsigma

Testsigma is a tool that is easy to use and does not require any scripts. Apart from ease of use, it supports end-to-end testing for web, mobile, desktop, SAP, Salesforce, and APIs. Testcase creation and maintenance are convenient. 

For example, to test login functionality, you can just write the workflow using a set of commands. These commands are written in plain English, making it easy for both technical and non-technical users to create test cases.

Testsigma key features

• Copilot for GenAI-powered testing
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Low-code/no-code with minimal user intervention.
• AI-powered self-healing tests.

2.Jest

Jest is a JavaScript testing framework designed and maintained by Facebook. It is ideal for unit testing and integration testing of JavaScript code, particularly for React apps.

Jest vs Puppeteer

• These tools serve different purposes in JavaScript testing, and they can be very complementary. Jest works primarily to facilitate unit tests and integration tests. Puppeteer works best for end-to-end testing. 
• Jest won’t allow you to simulate user interactions like clicking, typing, and navigating through web pages, but Puppeteer will.
• You can capture snapshots with Jest, but Puppeteer gives you screenshots and generates PDFs. 
• Jest stands out for its in-built mocking capabilities. It can mock modules and functions, which allows tests to run without side effects or external services. 
• It doesn’t seem to support page load tests either, which is another point in favor of Puppeteer. 
• Jest is also best suited for React applications, while Puppeteer works with most OS. 

Our Experience Using Jest

Jest is great for unit tests, but Puppeteer supports end-to-end testing. Thankfully, it can be integrated with Jest for more refined testing. By doing so, we could leverage Jest’s features like mocking, parallel testing, and reporting while using Puppeteer to automate browsers. 

As an example, consider jest-puppeteer, a preset that created a test environment with the abilities of Jest and Puppeteer. You can use Jest’s syntax and features along with Puppeteer’s capabilities by setting it up.

Jest Key Features

• Minimal configuration to get started since it is easy to set up. 
• The tool can take snapshots of rendered components to compare over time. 
• The tool can mock features to test code in isolation. It can also control the dependencies required for those features. 
• Enables the execution of parallel tests.

3. WebDriverIO (WDIO)

WebDriverIO is robust for automated web app testing via the WebDriver protocol. It can work in headless and headful mode. The tool supports both Selenium WebDriver and WebDriver DevTools protocol. This offers WDIO users flexible options for automating web browsers. 

It is compatible across multiple browsers and mobile devices, which is ideal for cross-browser testing. It can also be integrated with multiple frameworks for greater flexibility. 

WebDriverIO vs Puppeteer

• WDIO supports multiple browsers, while Puppeteer largely focuses on Chromium-based browsers. 
• By using WebDriver, WDIO provides wider compatibility than Puppeteer, while the DevTools Protocol is used by Puppeteer, which is largely designed for Chrome. 
• WDIO integrates with a large number of testing frameworks, which can be used to implement complex testing tasks. Puppeteer is largely used for tasks that don’t require such integrations. 

Our experience using WebDriverIO

WDIO is a solid Puppeteer alternative if you want wider compatibility across different browsers, while Puppeteer is limited to Chromium. It also provides async/await syntax while providing a huge advantage when it comes to creating asynchronous tests.

Additionally, just like Puppeteer, WDIO is ideal for end-to-end testing. 

Puppeteer is more apt when testing Chromium browsers only.  

To sum up, we recommend that you

• Use WDIO if the app requires robust cross-browser testing, broad device compatibility, and integration with complex testing frameworks. 
• Use Puppeteer if you’re mainly testing web apps running on Chrome.
  

WebDriverIO Key Features

• Compatible with multiple browsers and mobile platforms. 
• Integrated with test frameworks like Mocha, Jasmine, and Cucumber.
• Comes with a rich ecosystem of plugins and services to expand its productivity and what it can do.
• Users can build custom commands that are reusable across tests. 
• Supports the Page Object Model so dev can structure their tests for reusability and maintainability.
• Automatically waits for elements to be present before interacting with them during tests.
• Supports running headless browsers for tests. 

4. Nightwatch.js

Nightwatch.js is an open-source automated testing framework used to test web apps and sites. It automates browsers via the Selenium WebDriver API and offers JavaScript syntax for building tests. It is quite easy to set up and works on a clean and intuitive syntax for straightforward test creation with regular JavaScript structures and commands.

Nightwatch.js vs Puppeteer 

• Nightwatch.js uses the Selenium WebDriver API to run automated tests of web applications across various browsers. Once again, Puppeteer’s capabilities are largely confined to Chrome and Chromium.
• Puppeteer focuses on browser automation alone, but Nightwatch.js can offer features for comprehensive app testing. 
• Since Puppeteer can run browsers in headless mode and is more lightweight, it can run faster than Nightwatch.js. 
• Nightwatch.js works best for cross-browser functional testing, and Puppeteer is better for Chrome-specific scraping and testing. 

Our experience using Nightwatch.js

Nightwatch.js is also quite potent as a Puppeteer alternative. Easy setup and intuitive test creation for JavaScript users. Thanks to the in-built test runner, you won’t have to manage any additional configurations for tests. 

Its support for the Page Object Model (POM) helps with advanced test organization and readability. It also helps define page elements and actions differently from test logic, which helps maintain tests over time. 

It facilitates cross-browser testing, supporting multiple browsers, while Puppeteer works best for Chrome. While it is generally efficient, Nightwatch.js uses Selenium WebDriver, which may introduce some performance overhead compared to Puppeteer.

Nightwatch.js Key Features

• Provides a built-in test runner that eliminates the need to configure another test framework. 
• Supports cross-browser testing on different platforms with minimal configuration.
• Supports the Page Object Model pattern for better test organization and maintenance 
• Built-in features to automatically wait for elements before the test proceeds. 
• Provides diverse assertions and commands to simulate different user interactions and test verifications. 
• It can be configured to run tests in local and remote environments.

Check here – Nightwatch Alternatives

5. Urlbox

For those of you looking to automate other browsers instead of Chrome, you’ll need to find an alternative. Urlbox is a high level API that outperforms Puppeteer in various different stages. 

FIrstly, UrlBox is considered to have one of the best screenshot and screen scraping services. Their team is hard at work, ensuring the proper rendering of all the tiny details such as fonts and emojis. 

While other APIs find it difficult to handle the modern CSS features, Urlbox easily works with Flexbox and Grid to give you the ultimate automation experience.

Furthermore, this module features a modern web dashboard that helps smoothen your experience. The detailed and simplistic design will help you navigate through all your existing API options. 

This comes in handy when you’re in a difficult case and don’t know what your options are. Usually, with Puppeteer, you would have to manually code every solution to your problem.

Urlbox vs Puppeteer

So the question remains, How is Urlbox different from Puppeteer? Well, for starters, Urlbox has some of the best image rendering APIs that look stunning on Retina Displays. 

This helps retain all the crisp colors and outlines of your High-res images. Also, Puppeteer supports PNG, WEBP, and JPEG (you can also use other APIs from PDF) only. When using Urlbox, you can render images or screenshots in WEBP, JPEG, PDF, AVIF, SVG, and PNG formats.

In addition, Urlbox lets you manage everything in the code very easily without having to manually type in everything. Its admin controls will let you create user agents, set proxies, and even assign criteria to fail an API. 

With Puppeteer, this would require you to waste your time figuring out and writing each line of code manually.

When it comes to capturing and rendering screenshots, you need to watch out for cookie banners or pop-ups that can ruin the image. Urlbox helps to automatically accept cookies, block your pop-ups and even bypass captchas, in order to ensure a smooth operation. 

Our Experience Using Urlbox

What we love about Urlbox is how similar they have made it to Puppeteer. This helps you migrate to the Node.Js module without much hassle. The similarities in their UI and Urlbox’s modern dashboard make navigation simple and easy.

The quality of the images obtained from Urlbox was quite impressive. The auto pop-up and ad blocking code really help keep all the attention on the main content. Also, the rendering quality was much better, we didn’t find distressing horizontal seams or overlapping scrollbars.

Urlbox Key Features

• Rendering quality is far superior to Puppeteer
• Allows exporting in a wider range of formats without the need for external APIs
• Blocks pop-ups, ads, and accepts cookies for seamless screenshots
• Modern dashboard helps navigation and scrolling through existing APIs
• Can automate form submission

6. Playwright

Much like Puppeteer, Playwright is also a Node library that provides tons of high level API required in desktop automation. Microsoft released the first version back in January, 2020, and since then, it has been a formidable competitor to Puppeteer. 

This is mainly because the top contributors of Puppeteer later moved on to create the Playwright team.

As a result, the listed APIs and how they work are quite similar between the two libraries. However, a significant difference lies in the number of browsers they can support. 

While Puppeteer only lets you control Chrome or Chromium automation, Playwright can support other browsers such as Firefox and WebKit (Safari) with a single API.

Check here – Robot Framework vs Playwright

Playwright vs Puppeteer

When it comes to the differences, Playwright is like an upgraded version of Puppeteer with a few tweaks here and there. Although, one of the ground-breaking differences lies in Playwright’s ability to offer cross-browser support. 

Other than only controlling headless chrome browsers, you can now use codes across WebKit and Firefox too! This is by far one of the best alternatives to Puppeteer.

What’s more, the migration of contributors from Puppeteer to Playwright allowed them to refine their codes. As a result, the API is much easier to navigate through and code when compared to Puppeteer. This is also one of the reasons migrating from Puppeteer to Playwright is a piece of cake.

Check here – Leapwork vs Playwright

Our Experience Using Playwright

The first observation our team made was the easy and seamless migration process. Playwright’s UI didn’t seem radically different from Puppeteer, except for a few minor changes here and there. 

It does, however, have a better and faster browser context feature. This allows you to simulate the use of multiple devices in one browser.

Moreover, Playwright’s cross-browser support did make things easier when shifting from Chrome to Firefox. This also allowed Playwright to introduce new APIs to their library, enhancing the browser automation process. 

As this is still a work in progress, they haven’t patched the actual rendering engines for browsers other than Chrome. But they come with patches for Firefox browsers and WebKit, which seem to be working just fine.

Check here – Playwright vs Cypress

Playwright Key Features

• Has a wider range of APIs for added benefits
• Compatible with headless Chrome, Chromium, Firefox and WebKit (Safari)
• Similar UI to Puppeteer, making migration quick and easy
• Offers cross-browser support using patches from Firefox and WebKit

Check here – Nightwatch vs Playwright

7. CasperJs

CasperJs is also an open-source project like Testsigma, but it specializes in navigation scripting and as a testing utility. The codes are all written in JavaScript to be used by PhantomJS WebKit headless browsers. 

This basically acts as a library of tools used to program different scenarios and test your applications without having to start the browser.

CasperJs vs Puppeteer

CasperJS is absolutely delightful to use when you’re UI testing an application. The toolkit allows you to take both full page or segmented screenshots, depending on your choice. 

Once you highlight the command line, it will render the page in its own memory and save a screenshot. All of this occurs without your browser opening up. Puppeteer lets you take screenshots of both segmented and full pages too, but it would need the chrome browser to be up and running. 

The entire node library and its framework are quite simply coded, allowing users to create a new library within if needed. Also, you can integrate CasperJs with any web application too. 

Puppeteer is constricted to only controlling headless Chrome browsers, so you can’t really integrate it with other web applications as you would with CasperJs.

Our Experience Using CasperJs

Since JavaScript is a popular programming language, using CasperJs wasn’t very different from Puppeteer. With a simple and easy-to-understand framework, it should be a breeze for web developers and test automation engineers to hop on to CasperJs.

Another feature we loved is the ability to execute other codes inside a page while it is being tested. Using CasperJs, you can easily execute a Javascript code or load external JS while running tests to see the effects. 

CasperJs Key Features

• Simple framework offers easy navigation
• Uses the common JavaScript programming language
• Allows execution of JS code within the same run loop
• Can take screenshots without opening the browser
• Allows creation of new node libraries within parent libraries

8. Cypress

Cypress is an open-source test execution utility that lets you put your codes to the test. As it uses JavaScript, it appeals to most developers and test automation engineers. 

The end-to-end testing tool allows you to create scripts and run them at high speeds. You can also hover over specific commands to see the details and take specific screenshots.

Check here – Cypress Alternatives

Cypress vs Puppeteer

Puppeteer is great and all when it comes to testing small APIs, but if you’re looking to evaluate a whole application, Cypress works much faster. This is because the tool has paid services that are worthy of praise. When integrated, the paid features make the overall tool very powerful, and it can run tests at faster speeds.

Navigating through Cypress was fairly easy compared to Puppeteer. This was mainly because of the simple dashboard page. This lets you see all your available options clearly on one page. As a result, Cypress is more user-friendly and less time-consuming when solving difficult cases.

Check here – Ghost Inspector vs Cypress

Our Experience Using Cypress

Cypress has its own built-in IDE that lets you test each application thoroughly. Since the tool supports multiple browsers, unlike Puppeteer, it is necessary to test each application properly. Using Cypress was fairly easy as it has an interactive dashboard page which makes navigation simpler.

In our experience, Cypress was also much more reliable. We noticed a few common issues with Puppeteer scripts where clicks commands would not execute properly and tests would time out. With Cypress, we faced none of those issues, and tests ran smoothly every time.

Check here – Cypress vs React Testing Library

Cypress Key Features

• Features its own IDE for thorough application testing
• Uses JavaScript programming language
• Supports multiple browsers for web testing and automation
• End-to-end testing is easier to carry out and faster

Check here – Accelq vs Cypress

Why Do People Choose Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a node.js module that offers an extensive API to automate your browser. While it supports headless running in both Chrome and Chromium, you will still need to configure most of the commands.

Puppeteer’s seamless integration with Chrome and Chromium (an open-source browser) makes Puppeteer so popular. The Chrome DevTools team went all-in with this module, allowing you to generate PDFs, take screenshots, and many more.

Moreover, this open-source Node library makes it super easy to begin your browser automation process. Not only because the interface goes hand in hand with Chrome, but it can also communicate with the browser directly using nonstandard DevTools protocol. This makes the entire automation process faster and less complicated.

Besides just taking screenshots and generating PDFs, Puppeteer also allows you to create a testing environment for your commands. This will help you in running browser tests and diagnosing any issues with your codes or features. The module can crawl a single page application and generate a full pre-rendered content page.

How to Choose the Right Puppeteer Alternative?

The right Puppeteer alternative will depend on the specific needs, team expertise, and goals of the testing project in question. Here are a few steps to help with the evaluation: 

• Define the use case: Does the project need end-to-end testing, functional testing, web scraping, or performance monitoring? Do you need to test across multiple browsers, or is your project specific to Chrome/Chromium?
• Look at the tool’s features: Does the tool support multiple browsers, headless testing, and comprehensive APIs? 
• Integration abilities: Does the tool integrate with other test frameworks you already use? Is it easy to integrate into the CI/CD pipeline? 
• Community and Documentation: Does the tool come with comprehensive documentation and tutorials for setup and troubleshooting? Is there an active community that you can interact with to find solutions and plug-ins?
• Long-term usability: Is the tool actively updated and maintained to match technological innovations?
• Performance: Does the tool work fast to execute tests? How resource-intensive is it? Can the team afford to put in the time and effort needed to get the best out of this tool?
• Cost: Does an open-source Puppeteer alternative make more sense for you? What are your team’s budget and licensing needs?

Which is Best Among Puppeteer Alternatives?

Among the wide variety of tools available, Testsigma stands as the best alternative for Puppeteer. Because of the following reasons:

• Supports a wide range of browsers.
• Allows the creation and execution of tests with no code. 
• Tests can be built using plain English. 

Largely, Testsigma can accomplish much of what Puppeteer can without requiring coding expertise or hiring extra programmers to scale tests.

Final Words

After thoroughly going through each Puppeteer alternative, we have decided that Playwright is the best. When it comes to competing with Puppeteer, Playwright has been going head-on for quite a while. 

With ex-members from the Puppeteer team, this tool undoubtedly has the potential to break barriers in web automation. The cross-browser web automation and extended API library give you more options when testing codes.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is Puppeteer Only for Chrome?

The answer is “No,” Puppeteer is compatible with many browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Microsoft Edge.

2. Is Puppeteer Good for Web Scraping?

 Yes, the puppeteer is suitable for web scraping and is compatible with many browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Microsoft Edge.

3. Can Puppeteer Run Lambda?

The puppeteer can run on Lamda and can be deployed as  a packaged container image in a Lambda function

4. Can Docker Run Puppeteer?

Yes, Docker can run puppeteer. You can automate webpages as part of your CI pipelines and production infrastructure by doing so.

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