phantomjs VS Playwright

Compare phantomjs vs Playwright and see what are their differences.

Playwright

Playwright is a framework for Web Testing and Automation. It allows testing Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. (by microsoft)
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phantomjs Playwright
17 379
29,279 61,799
- 3.4%
0.0 9.9
over 1 year ago about 13 hours ago
C++ TypeScript
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

phantomjs

Posts with mentions or reviews of phantomjs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-30.
  • XZ: A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2024
    The points you make aren't unreasonable.

    It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6].

    This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you.

    Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear.

    Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace."

    [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label...

    [2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

    [3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html

    [4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/

    [5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident

    [6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541

    [7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

  • Show HN: Generate a concatenated file of all CSS used on a given website
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2023
    Last commit was in 2019, and it uses PhantomJS to query a page, which shutdown development in 2018

    https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344

  • youtube bandwidth throttled for cloud addresses?
    1 project | /r/youtubedl | 18 May 2023
    Install Phantomjs and see if that improves things.
  • How to Bypass Cloudflare in 2023: The 8 Best Methods
    4 projects | dev.to | 10 Apr 2023
    Automated Browser Detection. Cloudflare queries the browser for properties that only exist in automated web browser environments. For example, the existence of the window.document.__selenium_unwrapped or window.callPhantom property indicates the usage of Selenium and PhantomJS, respectively. For obvious reasons, you're getting blocked if this is detected.
  • Ask HN: What's the best way to get all the HTML from a JavaScript site?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2023
    I know there is https://phantomjs.org/ but is there something else people use these days?

    The issue is some websites curl works fine to get all the rendered html, but some you don't get any content without a javascript engine.

  • Detecting PhantomJS headless browsers
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 18 Jan 2023
    Despite the popularity of Puppeteer and Headless Chrome, my team of threat researchers and I wondered, to what extent PhantomJS was still being used by bot developers. In this post, we share how we identified traffic associated with PhantomJS, the types of attacks performed, and its use in comparison to Puppeteer Extra Stealth.
  • How to make a SPA SEO crawlable?
    1 project | /r/codehunter | 11 Jul 2022
    I've been working on how to make a SPA crawlable by google based on google's instructions. Even though there are quite a few general explanations I couldn't find anywhere a more thorough step-by-step tutorial with actual examples. After having finished this I would like to share my solution so that others may also make use of it and possibly improve it further. I am using MVC with Webapi controllers, and Phantomjs on the server side, and Durandal on the client side with push-state enabled; I also use Breezejs for client-server data interaction, all of which I strongly recommend, but I'll try to give a general enough explanation that will also help people using other platforms.
  • Malware/Virus protection?
    3 projects | /r/openSUSE | 21 Jun 2022
    Regarding youtube-dl, I remember someone mentioning they needed an external helper program called phantomjs to download from some sites. I really wouldn't recommend using phantomjs as it hasn't been updated since 2018 and I see it has known vulnerabilities too.
  • Building A Serverless Screenshot Service with Lambda
    4 projects | dev.to | 23 May 2022
    For this project we will need some extra binaries ( PhantomJS in particular) to take the screenshots. We’ll also use ImageMagick, but that is provided by AWS by default in the Lambda image, so we don’t package it separately.
  • yt-dlp release 2022.04.08
    3 projects | /r/youtubedl | 8 Apr 2022
    ERROR: [iq.com] apvtge3eng: PhantomJS executable not found in PATH, download it from http://phantomjs.org

Playwright

Posts with mentions or reviews of Playwright. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-23.
  • Sometimes things simply don't work
    3 projects | dev.to | 23 Apr 2024
    The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium.
  • The best testing strategies for frontends
    8 projects | dev.to | 22 Apr 2024
    With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests more reliable and less flaky. Also, it's a game changer that it introduced a test-runner - this made the integration between the headless browser and the actual test code much smoother.
  • Playwright Web Scraping 2024 - Tutorial
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.
  • The best testing setup for frontends, with Playwright and NextJS
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    // playwright.config.ts import { defineConfig } from "@playwright/test"; /** * See https://playwright.dev/docs/test-configuration. */ export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./src/pages", reporter: "list", use: { baseURL: "http://localhost:5432/", }, timeout: process.env.CI ? 10000 : 4000, // ... more options });
  • ✍️Testing in Storybook
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    Issues with Playwright
  • Episode 24/14: Angular Query, New Template Syntax
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Apr 2024
    Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright
  • Adding standalone or "one off" scripts to your Playwright suite
    1 project | dev.to | 8 Apr 2024
    This means you cannot place test files outside of this directory, which was brought up as a question on Github some time ago. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add another folder in the repo called "scripts", but Playwright does not allow multiple testDir values.
  • Learn Automated Testing At Home: A Beginner's Guide
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Apr 2024
    4.Playwright: Playwright is a browser automation library by Microsoft. Key Features: Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Provides cross-browser testing capabilities. Allows automating web, mobile, and desktop applications
  • HTML to PDF renderers: A simple comparison
    4 projects | dev.to | 26 Mar 2024
    HTML to PDF conversion is a common requirement in modern web applications. It allows users to save web pages, reports, and other content in a format that is easy to share and print. There are many libraries and services available for converting HTML to PDF, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we will compare some of the most popular HTML to PDF renderers in Node.js, including Puppeteer, Playwright, node-html-pdf, and Onedoc.
  • Creating Nx Workspace with Eslint, Prettier and Husky Configuration
    12 projects | dev.to | 25 Mar 2024
    Playwright [ https://playwright.dev/ ] ✅

What are some alternatives?

When comparing phantomjs and Playwright you can also consider the following projects:

puppeteer - Node.js API for Chrome

WebdriverIO - Next-gen browser and mobile automation test framework for Node.js

yt-dlp - A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader

undetected-chromedriver - Custom Selenium Chromedriver | Zero-Config | Passes ALL bot mitigation systems (like Distil / Imperva/ Datadadome / CloudFlare IUAM)

Nightmare - A high-level browser automation library.

TestCafe - A Node.js tool to automate end-to-end web testing.

slimerjs - A scriptable browser like PhantomJS, based on Firefox

nightwatch - Integrated end-to-end testing framework written in Node.js and using W3C Webdriver API. Developed at @browserstack

zombie - Insanely fast, full-stack, headless browser testing using node.js

Cypress - Fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser.

playwright-python - Python version of the Playwright testing and automation library.