Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Plotly VS puppeteer

Compare Plotly VS puppeteer and see what are their differences

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Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps

puppeteer logo puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium...
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31
  • puppeteer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02

Plotly features and specs

  • Interactivity
    Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
  • High-quality visualizations
    It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
  • Versatility
    Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
  • Python integration
    Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
  • Web-based
    The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
  • Open-source
    Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

  • Performance
    Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
  • Learning curve
    Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Cost for advanced features
    While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
  • Dependency management
    Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
  • Complexity
    For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

puppeteer features and specs

  • Headless Browsing
    Puppeteer allows headless browsing, which means you can automate and test web applications without opening a browser user interface, resulting in faster execution and lower resource usage.
  • Full Browser Control
    Enables full control over Chrome or Chromium browsers, allowing for comprehensive browser testing and automation, including taking screenshots, generating PDFs, and capturing web pages.
  • Rich API
    Offers a rich set of APIs that can control browsers, manage cookies, intercept network requests, and handle various browser events, making it versatile for different use cases.
  • Active Community
    Highly active open-source community with regular updates and a plethora of plugins and extensions, providing robust support and continuous improvements.
  • Compatibility
    Supports the latest JavaScript features and works seamlessly with popular libraries and frameworks, providing a modern development experience.

Possible disadvantages of puppeteer

  • Restricted to Chrome/Chromium
    Puppeteer is primarily designed to work with Chrome and Chromium browsers, limiting cross-browser testing capabilities compared to other tools that support multiple browsers.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple instances of headless browsers can be resource-intensive in terms of CPU and memory usage, potentially affecting performance on limited hardware.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires some learning curve for developers unfamiliar with browser automation or the Puppeteer API, making initial setup and usage potentially time-consuming.
  • Lacks JavaScript Redaction
    Unlike some other tools, Puppeteer does not natively support JavaScript error redaction, which means developers must manage error handling and debugging themselves.
  • Not Ideal for GUI Tests
    Since Puppeteer is headless by default, it might not be ideal for GUI end-to-end tests that require visual validation, requiring additional tools or configurations to enable full browser displays.

Plotly videos

Create Real-time Chart with Javascript | Plotly.js Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing plotly.py 3.0
  • Review - Is Plotly The Better Matplotlib?
  • Tutorial - Plotly Tutorial 2021
  • Review - Data Visualization as The First and Last Mile of Data Science Plotly Express and Dash | SciPy 2021

puppeteer videos

Puppeteer - Video Review

More videos:

  • Review - GameSpot Reviews - Puppeteer
  • Review - CGR Undertow - PUPPETEER review for PlayStation 3

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Plotly and puppeteer)
Data Visualization
100 100%
0% 0
Automated Testing
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Browser Testing
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 Plotly and puppeteer

Plotly Reviews

Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]
Plotly is specifically designed for companies who want to build and deploy analytic applications like dashboards using Python, Julia, or R without needing DevOps or Javascript developers.
Source: www.datapad.io
5 Best Python Libraries For Data Visualization in 2023
Plotly is a web-based data visualization toolkit that comes with unique functionalities such as dendrograms, 3D charts, and also contour plots, which is not very common in other libraries. It has a great API offering scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, and other visualizations. Plotly can even be accessed from a Python Notebook.
Top 8 Python Libraries for Data Visualization
Plotly is a free open-source graphing library that can be used to form data visualizations. Plotly (plotly.py) is built on top of the Plotly JavaScript library (plotly.js) and can be used to create web-based data visualizations that can be displayed in Jupyter notebooks or web applications using Dash or saved as individual HTML files. Plotly provides more than 40 unique...
5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries
Plotly is a graphing library that’s available for various runtime environments, including the browser. It supports many kinds of charts and graphs that we can configure with a variety of options.

puppeteer Reviews

Top Selenium Alternatives
Puppeteer offers more direct and tighter integration with Chrome or Chromium through the DevTools Protocol, unlike Selenium which abstracts the browser interaction through WebDriver, making it more versatile across different browsers but potentially less optimized for specific browser internals like those Puppeteer accesses in Chrome.
Source: bugbug.io
Best Data Scraping Tools
It is completely free. Puppeteer is well backed and supported by Google Chrome and hence replacing Selenium and PhantomJS. It automatically installs an efficient, compatible Chromium binary in its setup, therefore reducing the burden of keeping track on your browser.
Puppeteer vs Selenium
If you're looking for a better alternative, try Endtest. It has Puppeteer's speed, it supports Selenium's browsers AND it has all the features that they're missing.
Source: dev.to
Introduction to Headless Browser Testing
The Puppeteer API can be used to take screenshots, create PDFs, navigate pages, and fetch information from pages. We’ll write some example code to see Puppeteer in action.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, puppeteer should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 106 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.

Plotly mentions (33)

  • Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
    Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
    Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!🤓
    In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
    How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Python equivalent to power bi/power query?
    For dashboards: - https://plotly.com/ is probably my favourite, but there are others like streamlit, voila and others... Source: over 1 year ago
View more

puppeteer mentions (106)

  • Top React Testing Libraries in 2025
    Puppeteer is a headless browser automation tool built on Chromium. It allows developers to simulate user interactions, capture screenshots, and perform UI tests with a high degree of accuracy. Puppeteer is particularly useful for testing cross-browser compatibility and visual elements in React applications. Its robust API enables precise control over browser actions, making it a valuable tool for UI testing and... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • End-to-End SEO Testing with Playwright and Lighthouse
    Vitest is a next-generation JavaScript testing framework powered by Vite. It’s an excellent alternative to Jest, offering native TypeScript support, a fast setup, and solid performance. However, while it has an experimental headless browser, it’s not ideal for advanced scenarios like running SEO audits in CI/CD pipelines. Instead, we can pair Vitest with Pupetter, a more mature tool for headless browser automation. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • The Puppeteer Language Experiment
    This project tests how the browser language can be changed with Puppeteer. It implements multiple options to set the language of Chrome and checks each option against BrowserLeaks to see how it affected the JavaScript proeprties and HTTP headers available by the browser. For more information, see my article The Puppeteer Language Experiment on DEV.to. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Scrapy Vs. Crawlee
    In Crawlee, you can scrape JavaScript rendered websites using the built-in headless Puppeteer and Playwright browsers. It is important to note that, by default, Crawlee scrapes in headless mode. If you don't want headless, then just set headless: false. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Sometimes things simply don't work
    I am not in any way associated with the developers at puppeteer, but if you are looking for a way to contribute, they are open source. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Plotly and puppeteer, you can also consider the following products

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

Selenium - Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.

Chart.js - Easy, object oriented client side graphs for designers and developers.

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.

Highcharts - A charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application

Playwright - Playwright is automation software for Chromium, Firefox, Webkit using the Node.js library having a single API in place.