Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

puppeteer VS Herd Garden

Compare puppeteer VS Herd Garden and see what are their differences

puppeteer logo puppeteer

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

Herd Garden logo Herd Garden

Browser Superpowers for your AI Agents: Automate tasks, extract data, create AI web tools, and manage MCP servers in your browser or across millions of them. Secure, private, and scalable.
  • puppeteer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02
Not present

Browser Superpowers for your AI Agents

Core Features

  • Instant Web Access - Let AI browse the web through your existing accounts with one command
  • Maximum Privacy - Your data stays in your browser—no external servers or credential sharing
  • Ready-Made Trails - Dozens of pre-built automations for popular websites, ready to use
  • AI-Ready Structure - Perfect structured extraction for AI consumption, no messy HTML or screenshots
  • Works with Any AI - Seamless integration with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or custom agents

Dev-Friendly Benefits - Simple Command-Line Interface - Run powerful trails with a single command - Elegant APIs - Intuitive JavaScript and Python SDKs for custom automation - Browser Integration - Works with your existing Chrome, Edge, or Brave browser - Create & Share - Build and publish your own trails for the community

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.

Herd Garden 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

Herd Garden videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to puppeteer and Herd Garden)
Automated Testing
100 100%
0% 0
Automation
49 49%
51% 51
Browser Testing
100 100%
0% 0
Browser Automation
53 53%
47% 47

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 Herd Garden

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.

Herd Garden Reviews

We have no reviews of Herd Garden yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, puppeteer seems to be a lot more popular than Herd Garden. While we know about 106 links to puppeteer, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Herd Garden. 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
View more

Herd Garden mentions (3)

  • Detect and crash Chromium bots with one weird trick (bots hate it)
    Relevant plug: At Herd we offer a browser automation and orchestration framework that uses real browsers and thus sidesteps several of these issues[0]. The API is puppeteer-like but doesn't use it as we built the entire framework[1] from scratch. If you're wondering about the emphasis on MCPs, Herd is a generalist automation framework with a bespoke package format – trails[2], that supports MCP and REST... - Source: Hacker News / 25 days ago
  • WordPress launches new free AI website builder
    We are actually solving this problem by building the Huggingface Hub[0] for browser automations -automatically tested and updated around the clock, and a homegrown automation framework [1] that uses your own browser. It’s not just for AI, we created a custom package format[2] for automations that can run in CLI as a one-off, a REST API server, an MCP server with a single command.. 0: https://herd.garden/trails 1:... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate the Browser Using Cursor, Claude, VS Code
    We work on something similar and aim to be the huggingface hub for automations you can run in your browser[0], with built-in support for MCP SSE. Use the pre-built Trails[1][2] as MCP servers or create and publish your own with a familiar puppeteer-like API, powered by your or your friends browsers. 0: https://herd.garden 1: https://herd.garden/trails/@herd/browser 2: https://herd.garden/trails/@omneity/serp. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing puppeteer and Herd Garden, 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.

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.

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

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

BrowserAgent - No-Code AI Agents: Unlimited Browser-Based Automation

Browse AI - Automate any workflow on any website with no code. Used for monitoring, testing, automation, and data aggregation.Sign up now for free and receive 2x jobs per month – forever!