Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

BrowserCat VS Phantomjs

Compare BrowserCat VS Phantomjs 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.

BrowserCat logo BrowserCat

Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.

Phantomjs logo Phantomjs

PhantomJS is a headless browser that works hand in hand with Selenium to help developers more efficiently test their sites and apps.
  • BrowserCat Home Page
    Home Page //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Metrics Dashboard
    Metrics Dashboard //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Easy Setup
    Easy Setup //
    2023-12-21

Finally, you can develop browser automation without the pain and the cost of deploying a fleet of headless browsers. Connect to BrowserCat, scale globally, and pay only for what you use. Scrape the web, automate your workflows, test your apps, generate beautiful images and pdfs from HTML, give you AI agent web access, and more.

Get started in minutes. Our forever-free plan gives you 1,000 free requests per month.

  • Phantomjs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29

BrowserCat

$ Details
freemium $10.0 / Monthly
Platforms
Web REST API Google Chrome Firefox Safari

BrowserCat features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Phantomjs features and specs

  • Headless Execution
    PhantomJS can run scripts without the need for a graphical user interface, making it ideal for automation tasks such as web scraping and automated testing, especially in CI environments.
  • Full Web Stack
    It fully supports a range of web standards like DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and even SVG. This makes it highly versatile for different types of web interactions and manipulations.
  • Screenshots
    PhantomJS allows for easy capturing of web content as screenshots, which is useful for visual testing, performance analysis, and content verification.
  • Network Monitoring
    The tool offers capabilities for monitoring network traffic and performance, enabling developers to gather insights on resource loading times, HTTP status codes, and other networking metrics.
  • Simplicity
    PhantomJS provides a straightforward API, making it relatively easy to use and integrate into development and testing workflows even for developers with limited experience in scripting.

Possible disadvantages of Phantomjs

  • Deprecated
    Active development of PhantomJS has been discontinued. This means no new features, improvements, or security updates will be released, which can pose significant risk for long-term projects.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running headless browsers can still be resource-intensive. PhantomJS may consume considerable CPU and memory, which could become a bottleneck in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Modern Web Compatibility
    As the web evolves, new standards and features are introduced. Being discontinued, PhantomJS may lack support for the latest web technologies, potentially leading to rendering discrepancies or failures.
  • Difficulty in Debugging
    Debugging headless browser scripts can be more challenging compared to using full browsers with developer tools, making it harder to resolve complex issues that arise.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    While the API is straightforward, mastering PhantomJS scripting and effectively dealing with asynchronous JavaScript operations and browser-specific quirks can be difficult for beginners.

BrowserCat videos

No BrowserCat videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Phantomjs videos

How to use PhantomJS with Selenium?

More videos:

  • Review - DrupalCon Portland 2013: AUTOMATED TESTING WITH JASMINE AND PHANTOMJS

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to BrowserCat and Phantomjs)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Web Crawling
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing BrowserCat and Phantomjs.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

BrowserCat's answer

BrowserCat is built on robust open source technology that's under active development. The star of the show is Playwright, which is our recommended automation library. It's maintained by Microsoft, it officially supports JS, Python, Java, and .NET, and it's fast becoming the industry standard. BrowserCat also supports Puppeteer and numerous unofficial Playwright ports to Go, Rust, PHP, and Ruby.

What makes your product unique?

BrowserCat's answer

Unlike other headless browser providers, BrowserCat gives you total control over your browser instances for as long as you need them. Leverage the browsers cache, cookies, and storage for bespoke browser automation jobs that truly differentiate your business from the competition.

What's the story behind your product?

BrowserCat's answer

In previous corporate and startup gigs, I faced the challenge of developing robust, fast, and scalable browser automation. Most APIs in the space are too limiting for our needs and they were often incredibly slow. On the other hand, hosting your own headless browser fleet was a pain. I founded BrowserCat to make scaling up browser automation as easy, reliable, and affordable as deploying a serverless function.

How would you describe your primary audience?

BrowserCat's answer

We primarily serve developers, whether the seek to develop unique browser automation jobs or radically improve the performance of their integration tests. However, we frequently work with management, biz ops, and product leaders to solve problems they can't solve any way but through automation.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

BrowserCat's answer

BrowserCat is built for performance, scalability, stability, and affordability using modern web technologies. Many of our competitors were early to market and compete on entrenchment rather than functionality. Still others are bound by their existing users to continue supporting legacy tech, rather than embrace improved, modern standards. BrowserCat is focused on supporting your for the next ten years, rather than the past ten years.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare BrowserCat and Phantomjs

BrowserCat Reviews

We have no reviews of BrowserCat yet.
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Phantomjs Reviews

Top 10 Best Selenium Alternatives You Should Try
PhantomJS is an open-source, scriptable headless browser intended for automating webpage collaboration. It is also a powerful testing tool that supports various web standards and makes it appropriate for automation and integration with CI tools.
6 Popular Headless Browsers for Web Testing
Complexity is commonplace in the modern internet landscape, and PhantomJS is built to handle it all using basic command line testing. This headless WebKit is scriptable via the JavaScript API and uses CasperJS to handle testing. Capable of simulating “full navigation scenarios,” PhantomJS can reveal all the places where a user may encounter errors while browsing.
Source: www.keycdn.com
Introduction to Headless Browser Testing
PhantomJS supports headless testing with the use of CasperJS. CasperJS is a navigation scripting & testing tool for PhantomJS. It allows you to build full navigation scenarios using high-level functions and a straight forward interface to accomplish all sizes of tasks.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Phantomjs seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 11 times since March 2021. 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.

BrowserCat mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of BrowserCat yet. Tracking of BrowserCat recommendations started around Dec 2023.

Phantomjs mentions (11)

  • youtube bandwidth throttled for cloud addresses?
    Install Phantomjs and see if that improves things. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How to Bypass Cloudflare in 2023: The 8 Best Methods
    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. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: What's the best way to get all the HTML from a JavaScript site?
    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. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Detecting PhantomJS headless browsers
    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. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to make a SPA SEO crawlable?
    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... Source: almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing BrowserCat and Phantomjs, you can also consider the following products

Microlink - Extract structured data from any website

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.