Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

SHAFT_Engine VS BrowserCat

Compare SHAFT_Engine VS BrowserCat and see what are their differences

SHAFT_Engine logo SHAFT_Engine

Stop reinventing the wheel. Start using SHAFT. This is the official user guide for using SHAFT; The Unified Test Automation Engine.

BrowserCat logo BrowserCat

Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.
  • SHAFT_Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-19

SHAFT is an open-source MIT licensed test automation engine. It provides easy to use syntax to eliminate the need to write boilerplate code so that you can start authoring your automated tests immediately without waste. It also provides full unlimited access to all the best-in-class underlying testing frameworks like Selenium WebDriver, Appium, RestAssured, SikuliX, and others. SHAFT supports all kinds of automation across different platforms. Use SHAFT only if you want to maximize your ROI and create Scalable, Reliable, and Maintainable test automation without the waste of recreating an automation framework from scratch.

  • 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.

SHAFT_Engine

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
REST API Web Mobile Database Desktop CLI
Release Date
2016 February

BrowserCat

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to SHAFT_Engine and BrowserCat)
Browser Testing
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
100% 100
Website Testing
100 100%
0% 0
Web Crawling
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing SHAFT_Engine and BrowserCat.

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

Share your experience with using SHAFT_Engine and BrowserCat. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

Microlink - Extract structured data from any website

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

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.

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