Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ArchiveBox VS CrossBrowserTesting

Compare ArchiveBox VS CrossBrowserTesting and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

CrossBrowserTesting logo CrossBrowserTesting

Browser Testing made simple! Run automated, visual, and manual tests on 1500+ real browsers and mobile devices. Test more browsers, in less time.
  • ArchiveBox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline.

You can set it up as a command-line tool, web app, and desktop app (alpha), on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can feed it URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, feeds like RSS, bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. See input formats for a full list.

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshots, WARC, and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.). See output formats for a full list.

The goal is to sleep soundly knowing the part of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in durable, easily accessible formats for decades after it goes down.

  • CrossBrowserTesting Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

ArchiveBox features and specs

  • Offline website saving
  • Tagging
  • Scheduled archiving
  • Recursive crawling
  • Media extraction
  • Article text extraction
  • Static HTML exports
  • Full-text search

CrossBrowserTesting features and specs

  • Wide Range of Browsers and Devices
    CrossBrowserTesting offers a large selection of browsers and devices, allowing developers to test their applications in various environments to ensure compatibility.
  • Live Testing
    Users can perform live interactive testing on real devices, enabling them to manually verify the behavior of their application and catch issues that automated tests might miss.
  • Automated Testing Integration
    The platform provides integration with popular testing frameworks and tools such as Selenium, Appium, and others, facilitating automated testing workflows.
  • Visual Testing
    CrossBrowserTesting offers visual testing capabilities, allowing users to compare screenshots from different browsers to identify design inconsistencies.
  • Comprehensive Reports
    Detailed test reports with screenshots and logs are generated, helping users to quickly identify and address issues found during testing.
  • Parallel Testing
    The service supports parallel testing, enabling users to run multiple tests simultaneously, significantly reducing the overall testing time.
  • Easy-to-Use Interface
    The user interface is intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for both beginners and experienced testers to navigate and utilize the platform effectively.

Possible disadvantages of CrossBrowserTesting

  • Cost
    CrossBrowserTesting can be expensive, especially for small teams or individual developers who might find the subscription plans to be cost-prohibitive.
  • Performance
    Tests on real devices can sometimes be slow due to the availability and network constraints, which can affect the overall efficiency of the testing process.
  • Limited Mobile Devices
    While the platform includes a variety of devices, the selection might not cover all the latest models or less common devices, potentially limiting testing coverage.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    Some advanced features and integrations might require a learning curve, which could be challenging for users who are not familiar with automated testing or the specific tools supported.
  • Test Timeout Issues
    Occasional issues with test timeouts have been reported, which can disrupt the testing process and require reruns or additional troubleshooting.

Analysis of ArchiveBox

Overall verdict

  • ArchiveBox is a versatile and robust solution for individuals or organizations seeking to preserve web content. It provides a wide range of archiving options and allows for extensive customization. However, as a self-hosted tool, it requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain, which may not be ideal for non-technical users. Overall, it is a good tool if you have the technical capability and need to consistently archive online assets.

Why this product is good

  • ArchiveBox is an open-source self-hosted tool designed to help users save and manage web content offline. It is appreciated for its ability to archive web content including static HTML, PDFs, and media files in a format that is easy to navigate and long-lasting, even if the source website becomes inaccessible. The tool supports multiple input methods, including browser integrations, and is capable of running on various platforms, thus offering flexibility and scalability for personal and professional use.

Recommended for

    ArchiveBox is recommended for digital archivists, researchers, journalists, and any individuals or organizations that need to reliably save and organize web content. It is particularly suitable for those with the technical expertise to manage a self-hosted setup and who require an offline, permanent record of online information.

Analysis of CrossBrowserTesting

Overall verdict

  • CrossBrowserTesting is generally regarded as a good solution for cross-browser testing needs, particularly for teams that require real-time testing and robust automation capabilities. Its ease of use, extensive browser/device coverage, and integration options make it a strong choice for many development and QA teams.

Why this product is good

  • CrossBrowserTesting is considered a valuable tool because it provides a cloud-based platform for testing websites and mobile applications across different browsers, devices, and operating systems. It enables developers and QA teams to ensure that their applications function correctly on various platforms without needing to maintain a complex setup of physical devices. The platform offers real-time debugging, automated screenshot testing, and integration with various CI/CD tools, which streamlines the testing process.

Recommended for

    This service is highly recommended for software development teams, QA engineers, and web developers who need to ensure compatibility and functionality of their web applications across multiple browsers and devices. It is particularly useful for organizations with a focus on maintaining high-quality user experiences across various platforms.

ArchiveBox videos

Archiving the Internet Before it All Rots Away (talk by by ArchiveBox founder)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Installing ArchiveBox On Ubuntu 20.04 Using A Hyper-V VM To Preserve OSINT Investigation Findings

CrossBrowserTesting videos

Cross Browser Testing Tool Comparison โ€“ LambdaTest vs. CrossBrowserTesting

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and CrossBrowserTesting)
Bookmark Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Website Testing
0 0%
100% 100
Bookmarks
100 100%
0% 0
Browser Testing
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and CrossBrowserTesting.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

ArchiveBox's answer

  • Django
  • SQLite
  • Wget
  • Chromium
  • Youtube-dl / yt-dlp
  • singlefile
  • readability
  • mercury
  • git
  • ripgrep
  • sonic

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

ArchiveBox's answer

What's the story behind your product?

ArchiveBox's answer

ArchiveBox aims to enable more of the internet to be saved from deterioration by empowering people to self-host their own archives. The intent is for all the web content you care about to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox or other specialized software to replay it.

Vast treasure troves of knowledge are lost every day on the internet to link rot. As a society, we have an imperative to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.

Whether it's to resist censorship by saving articles before they get taken down or edited, or just to save a collection of early 2010's flash games you love to play, having the tools to archive internet content enables to you save the stuff you care most about before it disappears.

Image from WTF is Link Rot?... The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion--making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.

Because modern websites are complicated and often rely on dynamic content, ArchiveBox archives the sites in several different formats beyond what public archiving services like Archive.org/Archive.is save. Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

ArchiveBox's answer

ArchiveBox differentiates itself from similar self-hosted projects by providing both a comprehensive CLI interface for managing your archive, a Web UI that can be used either independently or together with the CLI, and a simple on-disk data format that can be used without either.

ArchiveBox is neither the highest fidelity nor the simplest tool available for self-hosted archiving, rather it's a jack-of-all-trades that tries to do most things well by default. It can be as simple or advanced as you want, and is designed to do everything out-of-the-box but be tuned to suit your needs.

If you want better fidelity for very complex interactive pages with heavy JS/streams/API requests, check out ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page.

If you want more bookmark categorization and note-taking features, check out Archivy, Memex, Polar, or LinkAce.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

ArchiveBox's answer

  • journalists
  • lawyers
  • librarians
  • digital preservation specialists
  • researchers
  • students
  • homelab / self-hosting community

User comments

Share your experience with using ArchiveBox and CrossBrowserTesting. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox seems to be a lot more popular than CrossBrowserTesting. While we know about 93 links to ArchiveBox, we've tracked only 6 mentions of CrossBrowserTesting. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

ArchiveBox mentions (93)

  • Wikipedia bans Archive.today after site executed DDoS and altered web captures
    A bit off topic, but are there any self hosted open source archiving servers people are using for personal usage? I think ArchiveBox[1] is the most popular. I will give it a shot, but it's a shame they don't support URL rewriting[2], which would be pretty important to me. I read a lot of blog and news articles that are split across multiple pages, and it's quite annoying to have to individually search through the... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable
    I run an ArchiveBox instance locally. Recommended! https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • YouTube downloaders (and how Google silenced the press)
    Https://archivebox.io/ could be a solution for that. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival
    I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years. The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years. I always include an archived link whenever I reference something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment. However, I... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?
    2. Drop the link into my instance of ArchiveBox [0] and will return to it a few weeks/months later or, more often than not, never again [0] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

CrossBrowserTesting mentions (6)

  • How can I test my site on safari if I don't have a Mac ?
    Yeah I moved on pretty quick from browserstack, but it seems to be the most popular. I've tried crossbrowsertesting.com but at the moment I really like app.lambdatest.com. Source: over 3 years ago
  • great list of "cool" sites from hnews
    Https://geizhals.de/ - this is a german site but the UI is nice and you can find a lot of stuff. Https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3? - a phone search site. When I was at https://crossbrowsertesting.com we used this site a lot Https://www.howacarworks.com/ - how a car works Https://www.mcmaster.com/ - the UI here is so nice. Those illustrations Https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - how does a mechanical... - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago
  • Learn How To Create, Test and Deploy a Single Page App with Vue 3 + Vite and Pinia
    Fortunately we donโ€™t need to install, nor configure, any other tools, unless maybe some fancy reporters, but for now we can get everything we need in terms of end-to-end automated testing out of Nightwatch. Besides Chrome, Nightwatch has built-in support for all major browsers, including Firefox, Edge, and Safari, all thanks to its integration with the W3C Webdriver API and Selenium. It also allows you to use... - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago
  • Free for dev - list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.)
    Crossbrowsertesting.com - Manual, Visual, and Selenium Browser Testing in the cloud - free for Open Source. - Source: dev.to / almost 5 years ago
  • How do yโ€™all test responsiveness of website?
    Professionally, I do basically the same for dev testing. We also have various devices on different platforms/versions in the office when needed, and our QA team primarily uses Cross Browser Testing Tool. If I need to check something specific, I usually use CBT. Source: about 5 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and CrossBrowserTesting, you can also consider the following products

Raindrop.io - All your articles, photos, video & content from web & apps in one place.

Sauce Labs - Test mobile or web apps instantly across 700+ browser/OS/device platform combinations - without infrastructure setup.

wallabag - Save the web, freely.

BrowserStack - BrowserStack is a software testing platform for developers to comprehensively test websites and mobile applications for quality.

Archive.org - Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies...

browserling - Live interactive cross-browser testing from your browser.