Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

puppeteer VS Colly

Compare puppeteer VS Colly and see what are their differences

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puppeteer logo puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium...

Colly logo Colly

Colly is a scraping framework to extract structured data from websites.
  • puppeteer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02
  • Colly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-31

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.

Colly features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Analysis of puppeteer

Overall verdict

  • Puppeteer is considered a strong choice for developers seeking a robust and efficient way to automate browser tasks. It is particularly favored in situations where headless browser actions are required due to its rich feature set and its solid support from both the community and its active development team. However, it may not be the best choice for those looking for cross-browser testing since it focuses specifically on Chrome or Chromium.

Why this product is good

  • Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium browsers. It is widely appreciated for its speed, reliability, and comprehensive feature set that makes it easy to automate tasks like web scraping, automated testing, and taking screenshots. Users benefit from the ability to programmatically control browser actions, which can be useful for testing user interactions and rendering dynamic content.

Recommended for

  • Web scraping projects that need to render dynamic web pages or deal with JavaScript-heavy sites.
  • Automated testing scenarios that involve simulating user interactions and verifying UI changes.
  • Performance analysis and monitoring of JavaScript execution in a controlled environment.
  • Developers who need to generate PDFs or capture screenshots from web pages programmatically.

puppeteer videos

Puppeteer - Video Review

More videos:

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

Colly videos

[ENG SUB] COLLY PLUS LYCOPENE REVIEW | 6,500mg Collagen Juice?

More videos:

  • Review - Colly Peach Product Review - effective pampaputi at pang tanggal pimples | Jastine Delfin
  • Review - COLLY GLUTA C PLUS REVIEW | Effective ba?| PRODUCT FROM THAILAND | JADERICK LUYA | PHILIPPINES

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to puppeteer and Colly)
Automated Testing
94 94%
6% 6
Development
0 0%
100% 100
Browser Testing
91 91%
9% 9
Browser Automation
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

Colly Reviews

We have no reviews of Colly yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, puppeteer seems to be a lot more popular than Colly. While we know about 106 links to puppeteer, we've tracked only 9 mentions of Colly. 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.

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 / 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 / 3 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 / about 1 year 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
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Colly mentions (9)

  • Web Scraping in Golang
    In this blog, we will be covering the basics of web scraping in Go using the Fiber and Colly frameworks. Colly is an open-source web scraping framework written in Go. It provides a simple and flexible API for performing web scraping tasks, making it a popular choice among Go developers. Colly uses Go's concurrency features to efficiently handle multiple requests and extract data from websites. It offers a wide... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • FAQs on my side project
    I wrote a script in Go to scrape jobs from these companies. If you are interested in writing scraper with Go, check out http://go-colly.org/ a potent tool for scraping in Go. I scrape every day just to keep up to date with the jobs. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Preferred Programming Languages for Web Scraping
    In addition the article mention that "Also, C++ is not good for creating web crawlers, is programming language is great for simple web scraping" but in reality when you need a fast and performant crawler C++ will be beat languages like ruby and python from performance perspective , the same for golang programming language which will perform better most of the programming languages written on the article and has... Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Scraping websites with go
    Strange that the author didn’t mention the most popular and, frankly, convenient way: Colly. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: What are the best tools for web scraping in 2022?
    I’m not sure about “best” but I’ve been using Colly (written in Go) and it’s been pretty slick. Haven’t run in to anything it can’t do. http://go-colly.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

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

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.

Robot framework - Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance...

SerpApi - Scrape Google search results from our fast, easy, and complete API.

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