Puppeteer is a popular Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It's mostly used for web scraping, generating screenshots, automating form submission, and more. However, there are several other libraries and tools available that offer similar functionalities. Here are some of them:
Selenium: Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling a web browser through the program. It is functional for all browsers, works on all major OS and its scripts are written in various languages i.e Python, Java, C#, etc.
Playwright: Playwright is a Node.js library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is fast, reliable and capable of running in non-headless environments. It was created by Microsoft and is considered by many as a direct competitor to Puppeteer.
Beautiful Soup: Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful: simplicity, the ability to handle ill-structured and malformed markup, and speed.
Scrapy: Scrapy is an open source and collaborative web crawling framework for Python. It is used to extract the data from the web page with the help of selectors based on XPath.
PhantomJS: PhantomJS is a scripted, headless browser used for automating web page interaction. It provides a JavaScript API enabling automated navigation, screenshots, user behavior and assertions making it a common tool used in 'headless' website testing.
Cypress: Cypress is a next generation front end testing tool built for the modern web. It's often used as an end-to-end testing framework, but it's also capable of automating most of the browser tasks you can perform manually.
Cheerio: Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It allows for fast, resilient web scraping in a server-side environment.
jsdom: jsdom is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML Standards, for use with Node.js. It allows you to interact with webpages as if you were in a browser, right from your javascript code.
Nightmare: Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library. It was designed with automation and ease of use in mind, capable of performing tasks such as screenshots, scraping, user interaction, and more.
WebDriverIO: WebDriverIO is a custom implementation of W3C webdriver JSON wire protocol. It's a good alternative for Puppeteer for end-to-end testing and browser automation.
Depending on the exact requirements of your project, one of these alternatives may be a better fit for your needs. Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to choose the one that aligns best with your specific use case.
