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Phantomjs VS Tape

Compare Phantomjs VS Tape 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.

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.

Tape logo Tape

Easy, collaborative social video app
  • Phantomjs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29
  • Tape Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01

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.

Tape features and specs

  • Simplicity
    Tape provides a minimal and straightforward API that makes it easy to write and read tests without a lot of boilerplate.
  • No Globals
    Tape does not introduce any global variables into the test environment, which helps avoid potential conflicts and promotes a cleaner test setup.
  • Node.js Compatibility
    As a testing tool primarily designed for Node.js, Tape integrates seamlessly without requiring complex setup or configuration.
  • Stream Output
    Tape outputs results in a stream, allowing easy integration with various reporting tools and custom processing.
  • Flexible Use
    Tape allows custom test case organization and can be easily combined with other testing utilities as needed.

Possible disadvantages of Tape

  • Limited Features
    Tape lacks some advanced testing features such as spies, mocks, and code coverage out of the box, necessitating additional libraries.
  • Steeper Learning Curve for Complex Testing
    For users familiar with feature-rich frameworks like Mocha or Jest, transitioning to Tape's minimalistic approach may require more effort for complex test setups.
  • Less Community Support
    Tape has a smaller community compared to larger test frameworks like Jest, which means fewer third-party plugins and support resources.
  • Limited Documentation
    While Tape's documentation covers basic concepts, it may not be comprehensive enough for developers requiring in-depth guidance or usage patterns.

Analysis of Phantomjs

Overall verdict

  • As of now, PhantomJS is no longer actively maintained, and the developer community has largely transitioned to using more modern alternatives like headless versions of Chromium or Firefox, such as Puppeteer or Playwright. These alternatives offer better support, more features, and are actively maintained. Therefore, while PhantomJS was good in its time, it is generally not recommended for new projects.

Why this product is good

  • PhantomJS was once a popular headless browser for automating web page interaction and capturing screenshots, especially useful for testing and web scraping. It supports web standards such as DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. Its main advantage was providing a fast and efficient way to run tests without needing a full graphical browser environment.

Recommended for

    PhantomJS may still be suitable for legacy projects where it has already been integrated, and the overhead of switching to a new tool would outweigh the benefits. However, for new projects or if you are revisiting an existing project for upgrades, it is recommended to consider more current tools like Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium.

Phantomjs videos

How to use PhantomJS with Selenium?

More videos:

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

Tape videos

Which Duct Tape Brand is the Best? Let's find out!

More videos:

  • Review - Alien Tape Review: Does This As Seen on TV Tape Work?
  • Review - Nano Tape Review: Put to the Test!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Phantomjs and Tape)
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Automated Testing
41 41%
59% 59
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

Tape Reviews

We have no reviews of Tape yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Phantomjs might be a bit more popular than Tape. We know about 11 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to Tape. 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.

Phantomjs mentions (11)

  • youtube bandwidth throttled for cloud addresses?
    Install Phantomjs and see if that improves things. Source: about 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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Tape mentions (10)

  • Express API Testing
    Last but not least important are ava, uvu and tape; they are a really light and fast test runners. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Straight talk: Salary discussion thread
    OK will do. Do you have any tips on finding a suitable project? Ideally I was hoping to to contribute to a piece of software that I actually use/know/like/want to improve. Given that, and my area of expertise, I had shortlisted Signal Desktop, and Tape. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Find component by display name when the component is stateless functional, with Enzyme
    Reactjs I have the following components: // Hello.jsexport default (React) => ({name}) => { return ( Hello {name ? Name : 'Stranger'}! )}// App.jsimport createHello from './Hello'export default (React) => () => { const Hello = createHello(React) const helloProps = { name: 'Jane' } return ( )}// index.jsimport React from 'react'import { render } from 'react-dom'import createApp from... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Tools for testing Functional Web Apps
    For us at Begin and Architect, tape has been in use for several years. Tape has a stable and straightforward API, routine maintenance updates, and outputs TAP, making it really versatile. While TAP is legible, it's not the most human-readable format. Fortunately, several TAP reporters can help display results for developers. Until recently, Begin's TAP reporter of choice was tap-spec. Sadly tap-spec wasn't kept up... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Chaijs.com just let their domain expire
    I really enjoy Ava [1] or anything assert-tape-like [2]. "uvu" [3] is getting a lot of love lately, but it's very feature limited and much of it's touted advantages are at the detriment to feature set. [1] https://github.com/avajs/ava [2] https://github.com/substack/tape [3] https://github.com/lukeed/uvu Jest is great for front-end (or full stack integration) testing, but I feel it's specialized for that use-case... - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

Mocha - Sponsors. Use Mocha at Work? Ask your manager or marketing team if they'd help support our project. Your company's logo will also be displayed on npmjs. com and our GitHub repository.

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Cypress.io - Slow, difficult and unreliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Install Cypress in seconds and take the pain out of front-end testing.

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

Jasmine - Behavior-Driven JavaScript