Difference Between Puppeteer and Selenium – Which is best?

Selenium:                                                                                                    

Selenium has been established in 2004and; it is the most powerful test automation tool from that time. And supports a variety of browsers like chrome, firefox, safari and also support programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Java and C#. It has been working for 16 years. We will discuss about DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PUPPETEER AND SELENIUM

Salient features of Selenium:

• It offers parallelism.
• Multiple language access.
• Selenium with appium has the ability of mobile automation.
• Cross-browser support.

Puppeteer:

Puppeteer was released in 2017 for front end tests and development. It is used with chrome and chromium and supports the only javascript.

Salient features of puppeteer:

• It has excellent control over chrome.
• Headless mode is fast.
• The ability of web scraping.
• Measure load time and renderings.

Puppeteer and Selenium both are modern tools. They both used for test automation. Selenium is used as a time tested tool, but a puppeteer is also a modern tool with some advanced features, it is a new contender and robust as compared to Selenium. When people want functional test automation, the first tool which comes in their mind is Selenium. Except this, there are many tests like UFT and silk tests to which microfocus owned. In a few past years, Selenium is a widely used tool due to its open-source and increased maturity as compared to other tools. Selenium has now become a standard solution when it deals with functional automation due to its low acquisition cost and high level of integration with net, java, python and node js.

On the other hand, there is little difference between Selenium and puppeteer. Puppeteer is a new source of testing automation for browser actions, whereas Google developed puppeteer as an open-source node.js with comprehensive coverage of any action on google. The idea of API allows automating functions in google browsers, chrome and chromium. Puppeteer is also suitable for non-chrome applications such as Mozilla, stalwarts and firefox. They almost do 80% of their work with it. Both puppeteer and Selenium have different advantages over each other. The first thing we know about when any tool automation kit is to  google sponsorship and project support.

Some of the features with the difference between puppeteer and Selenium is present here.

• Puppeteer gives access to measurement of loading and chrome performance analysis tool.
• Puppeteer has more control on the chrome browser as compare to Selenium due to sophisticated knowledge of chrome.
• Selenium uses Boni Garcia’s Webdriver manager for removal of dependency while puppeteer has an external driver for this removal.
• Puppeteer is set as default in headless mode while it can also be used as non-default in non-headless mode.

Where there are many benefits of puppeteer over Selenium, there are also some limitations in it.

• Puppeteer is only limited to chrome browser until the completion of firefox support.
• Puppeteer is only available for Node js, and if there will be some other languages in future, it cannot support these languages.
• Selenium has a greater testing community, while puppeteer has a small testing community.

In the difference between puppeteer and Selenium, it is observed that puppeteer is more appreciated than Selenium because puppeteer can automate tasks which Selenium cannot.

• It can validate titles of search pages.
• Perform a search and validation allows search through some results.
• Invalid search.

Puppeteer API is intuitive with chrome so it can perform the following tasks.

• Initialize the chrome browser.
• Create a new page in the initialization of chrome browser.
• Navigation of specific page.

Anyone who wants an automated test of critical factors in which programming languages are included programming patterns allows maintenance of root of dynamic objects. Therefore we need designs like Page Object Model (POM), this allows the automate the test code based on the architecture that we want to automate.

It is also possible to apply this to the paradigm in javascript.

These all features make puppeteer more advance as compare to Selenium.

Both Selenium and puppeteer have one compelling feature that is the ability to run java in the browser. This feature is endless, and use of this feature in puppeteer is effortless.

We can install puppeteer with node js while Selenium needs js and chrome for installation.

Importance of residential proxies for Selenium and puppeteer:

Proxies are essential if you want to use Selenium and puppeteer because always there is a risk of malware and denial attacks. So proxies help in encryption of data so that it may not be affected by any attack. Proxies also help in the maintenance of internal network structure. Proxies help the users to secure their personal information and data from getting hacked. It is not only used for security purpose but also used for attaining the speed of browsers. That hides your IP address and also helps you in getting access to restricted and blocked sites. It reduces load time and filters malicious software.

Conclusion:

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that puppeteer is more good to use as compare to Selenium. Difference between puppeteer and Selenium tells that puppeteer has advance features. After reading this article, it is not difficult for you to choose a tool for automation of your website. But if you do not need for cross-browser, than puppeteer is the best option. For developers and testers puppeteer is the very best tool for experimentation and an essential part of a toolbox.

Puppeteer is also known as a node library, and it is less painful to use. Puppeteer is now widely used for email scrapping and website scraping services. You can easily install puppeteer in your computers and laptops. It uses a specific version of chromium; therefore, its API is guaranteed for work out of the box. Now it is informed that you better go with puppeteer for automation of your websites. It is a fascinating tool when you don’t need cross-browser testing. It is a fantastic tool if we want to read load values and for checking web performances. While the limitation of Selenium makes it defacto, otherwise it is a better option if you have not to access to puppeteer.