Selenium vs Puppeteer for Web Scraping – Which is Better?

When it comes to web scraping, Selenium and Puppeteer are two names that regularly come up. Though they mainly serve the same purpose, choosing one over the other can make or break your web scraping process. It’s crucial to understand the differences and choose the right tool to fit your profile.

Selenium and Puppeteer have a host of differences between them, ranging from ease of use and support structures to execution speed. Here, we shall discuss the major differences between Selenium and Puppeteer to allow you to make an informed choice between them.

1. Architecture

Selenium and Puppeteer have significant differences in how they run commands. Selenium uses its web driver to provide a set of APIs to facilitate communication with your preferred driver. Selenium 4, particularly, uses a standardized WebDriver W3C protocol that makes it easier for it to encode and decode API requests and communicate directly with the browser. This eliminates the need for a middleman to facilitate communication.

Puppeteer, on the other hand, uses the DevTools protocol to transfer information. The protocol is native to chrome, and other browsers, meaning that Puppeteer can communicate with the supported browser directly.

2. Support Structures

When it comes to support structures, Selenium is a leader, as it seeks to support a wide variety of browsers. This tool supports not only chrome, but also chromium, opera, internet explorer, and the apple-based safari. While Selenium supports an array of browsers, Puppeteer only supports chrome and chromium.

This difference takes us back to their varying roles. Selenium is an automated web-UI testing library, while Puppeteer is just a remote control library developed only for chrome. Chrome is used by at least two thirds of the total population using the internet. So if you’re concerned with browser-specific issues, it’s crucial to choose a web scraping tool that has a support impact that will convince your users’ experience.

3. Performance

Puppeteer takes advantage of the DevTools that Chrome provides to allow recording of the performance timeline of web pages. Therefore, you can capture the timeline traces of websites to examine performance. Furthermore, thanks to Puppeteer’s high-level API control over Chrome Developers Tools Protocol, you can control data extraction closely and test website caching.

Selenium IDE allows you to use the recording capability and the autocomplete function to navigate commands during the process. Businesses looking for better lead generation and tracking of top talent can benefit immensely from this functionality as selenium IDE facilitates automatic storage of elements in an easily accessible format. Although the recording tool is not supported by the latest browser versions, there are several plug-ins on the browsers that serve the same purpose. This remains a standout Selenium feature.

4. Origin

Puppeteer is a product of Google and it runs the script on chromium. It offers great control over chrome and chromium, as it’s their product. Puppeteer also provides a high-level API to control the two browsers using the DevTools Protocol. It runs headlines most of the time but can be changed to run full since it’s created by Google.

Alternatively, Selenium is a node.js library for automating chrome. It is open source and has a large extension library to integrate with third-party tools. Simply put, it’s a web framework for setting web applications.

5. Usability

Selenium is a testing library. This means that to use it, you have to set up situations for your software and then verify that it did what you expected. A lot of code is needed for that, and coupled with the fact that it supports multiple browsers, it makes it even harder to use. Most of the time, you’ll need to write the code by hand instead of quickly generating an automatic one.

However, this is where Puppeteer shines exceptionally. This is because it is focused on a single API so it’s easier to automate the code-making process. Setting up and writing tests is where most UI testing tools fail, so reducing the setup time makes you more likely to succeed.

6. Programming Language

This is another differentiating feature between Puppeteer and Selenium. On one hand, Selenium is focused on providing broad coverage of various programming languages. It supports C#, Java, Python, Ruby, and Javascript in the first-party Selenium IDE, a tool that simplifies writing Selenium tests. As you seek to access data from the web, you are likely conversant with at least one, as they are the most popular languages.

Puppeteer, on the other hand, is a browser control tool focused on providing a particularly fixed set of control structures. Due to this, Puppeteer only supports Javascript programming language. However, if you’re building a web application or attempting web scraping, it’s likely that you already have an entire Javascript ecosystem set up, so it probably won’t be a deal-breaker.

There are other solutions for non-programmers that include a ready-to-use web scraper where you simply fill in parameters based on which the tool will perform the task. Some companies need to get their data fast, and when it’s coming to huge data amounts like with LinkedIn company profiles, some companies will prefer to purchase LinkedIn datasets for business intelligence to avoid the hassle of collecting the data themselves and wasting resources and time. It all depends on your business needs.

7. Setup

The process of installing and getting started with Puppeteer is relatively simple. You can use the npm tool to install it, as it is a node library. Installing Puppeteer is a one-step process in which you also get the latest version of chromium to work with the API. Its size is also favorable and varies according to the operating system.

Unlike Puppeteer, setting up Selenium is not a straightforward process. This is because it supports multiple languages and browsers, so you have to make sure you have the right conditions to set it up. Also, unlike Puppeteer, which installs chromium during setup, you may have to install the compatible web drivers for your browser. These factors make the process even longer and more challenging.

Selenium or Puppeteer?

Both Selenium and Puppeteer are powerful tools with functional capabilities for test automation and web scraping. If you’re using Google Chrome, Puppeteer is better as it provides unparalleled access and performance with native integrations. Moreover, it is more of an automation tool than a testing one. This is what makes it suitable for automation tasks such as web scraping and crawling.

Selenium, on the other hand, is perfect if you prefer to use a range of browsers and are conversant with various languages. It also provides more features compared to Puppeteer. This means that you can interact with multiple browsers directly. Selenium helps to expand the scope for data scraping without relying on different tools from different platforms.

Having covered the main differences between Puppeteer and Selenium, the choice comes down to your testing, automation, and data scraping requirements.