Puppeteer vs Selenium: Which to Choose?

What Is Puppeteer?

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium browsers. It allows you to automate web tasks like clicking buttons, filling out forms, taking screenshots, or scraping content from websites.

You can also run Puppeteer in full (non-headless) mode, so you can see the browser while it performs actions.

For more information, check out this Puppeteer tutorial.

What Are the Core Features of Puppeteer?

Puppeteer offers browser automation, PDF generation, web scraping, and performance monitoring. It also supports network interception, mobile emulation, extension testing, stealth mode, and debugging.

• Chrome DevTools Protocol Integration: Direct access to Chrome’s internal APIs enables advanced debugging, performance profiling, network monitoring, and security analysis features.
• PDF Generation: Generate high-quality PDFs from HTML/CSS layouts with custom headers, footers, page breaks, and print media styles. Supports dynamic content rendering and complex layouts.
• Advanced Web Scraping: Handles modern SPAs, authentication flows, infinite scroll, lazy loading, and dynamic content rendering. Built-in request interception and response modification capabilities enable sophisticated data extraction workflows.
• Performance Monitoring: Programmatically capture Core Web Vitals, network timing, memory usage, and runtime performance data. Integrates seamlessly with Lighthouse for comprehensive performance auditing and optimization insights.
• Network Interception: Intercept, modify, or block network requests and responses for testing offline scenarios, API mocking, and security analysis. Supports HAR file generation and custom response injection.
• Browser Context Isolation: Create isolated browser contexts (similar to in-cognito mode) for parallel testing scenarios, user session simulation, and data separation between test runs.
• Chrome Extension Testing: Load and test Chrome extensions within Chromium-based browsers for specialized automation scenarios and extension functionality validation.
• WebDriver BiDi Support: Recent versions of Puppeteer support the WebDriver BiDi protocol, enabling Puppeteer browser automation in Firefox with increasing feature parity.
• Stealth Mode: Optional stealth plugins help evade basic bot detection mechanisms, useful for web scraping scenarios requiring higher success rates.
• Mobile Device Emulation: Simulate various mobile devices, screen sizes, touch events, and network conditions. Includes geolocation simulation, device orientation changes, and mobile viewport behaviors.
• Enhanced Debugging: Built-in debugging modes, automatic screenshot capture on failures, and integration with Chrome DevTools for advanced troubleshooting and performance analysis.

What Is Selenium?

Selenium is a widely used framework for automating web browsers. It works across multiple browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Selenium lets you write test scripts in various programming languages, including Java, Python, C#, and JavaScript.

It controls a browser and simulates user actions such as clicking buttons, filling forms, navigating pages, or extracting data.

For more details, check out this Selenium tutorial.

What Are the Core Features of Selenium?

The core features of Selenium include cross-browser automation, multi-language support, element interaction, handling alerts and frames. It also manages waits, navigation, and test script execution.

• Cross-Browser Compatibility: Native drivers for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer ensure consistent test execution across all major browsers.
• Multi-Language Support: Official bindings available for Java, Python, C#, JavaScript (Node.js), and Ruby. Teams can leverage existing language expertise and integrate Selenium into their preferred development stacks without learning new languages.
• Distributed Testing Infrastructure: Execute tests in parallel across multiple browsers and operating systems. Supports both local grids and cloud-based solutions for massive scale testing with centralized reporting and resource management.
• Advanced Element Location: Locators in Selenium WebDriver, including CSS selectors, XPath, ID, name, class name, tag name, and link text. Further, Selenium waits, and ExpectedConditions in Selenium reduce flaky tests caused by timing issues.
• Page Object Model Support: Page Object Model in Selenium supports creating reusable, maintainable test code through page object abstraction. Reduces code duplication and improves test suite organization for large-scale applications.
• Browser Configuration Management: Extensive options for configuring browser preferences, extensions, download behavior, security settings, and performance profiles. Supports headless execution, custom user agents, and browser-specific features.
• Complex Interactions: Complex user interactions including drag-and-drop, mouse hovering, keyboard combinations, right-click contexts, and multi-touch gestures.
• Screenshot & Video Recording: Built-in screenshot capabilities with full page, element-specific, or viewport capture options. Integration with third-party tools for video recording and visual regression testing workflows.
• Selenium Manager: Includes built-in driver management that automatically downloads and configures browser drivers. Selenium Manager eliminates manual driver setup and version compatibility issues.
• Chrome DevTools Integration: Direct access to Chrome DevTools features, including performance profiling, network monitoring, and console logging for enhanced debugging and analysis capabilities.

What Are the Differences Between Puppeteer and Selenium?

Puppeteer is faster, Chrome-focused, JS-only, with PDF, network, and DevTools support. Selenium is cross-browser, multi-language, mature, slower, with built-in Grid and broader enterprise use.

How to Set Up Puppeteer?

Use the npm install puppeteer command to install Puppeteer. Create a test script, launch a browser, open a page, and run actions like navigating, scraping or capturing screenshots.

Let’s see how to install and automate the simple scenario using Puppeteer.

To install Puppeteer, run the following command:

npm install puppeteer

Test Scenario:

• Launch the browser.
• Open the TestMu AI Selenium Playground website.
• Print the page title.
• Take a screenshot.
• Close the browser.

Here is the test script written in Puppeteer. It opens a Chromium browser, loads the TestMu AI Selenium Playground page, and prints the page title. It then takes a screenshot of the page.

Finally, it closes the browser.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://www.lambdatest.com/selenium-playground/');
  console.log(await page.title()); // Print page title
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'puppeteer.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

How to Set Up Selenium?

Install Selenium using the pip install selenium command, download the appropriate WebDriver for your browser, then write a test script importing selenium.webdriver, start the driver, and control the browser.

Let’s see how to install and automate the simple scenario using Selenium.

To install Selenium WebDriver, run the following command:

npm install selenium-webdriver

Test Scenario:

• Launch the browser.
• Open the TestMu AI Selenium Playground website.
• Print the page title.
• Take a screenshot.
• Close the browser.

Below is the test script written in Selenium WebDriver. It opens a Chrome browser, loads the TestMu AI Selenium Playground page, prints the page title, takes a screenshot, and then closes the browser.

const { Builder } = require('selenium-webdriver');
const fs = require('fs');
(async () => {
  const driver = await new Builder().forBrowser('chrome').build();
  await driver.get('https://www.lambdatest.com/selenium-playground/');
  console.log(await driver.getTitle()); // Print page title
  const screenshot = await driver.takeScreenshot();
  fs.writeFileSync('selenium.png', screenshot, 'base64');
  await driver.quit();
})();

Puppeteer vs Selenium: Which One to Pick?

Choose Puppeteer when you want fast, Chrome-focused runs in a JavaScript workflow. Pick Selenium if you need reliable coverage across many browsers.

When to Pick Puppeteer:

• Chrome Focus: Use Puppeteer when your workflow centers on Chrome or Chromium and demands quick execution for rapid development feedback.
• Speed Priority: Ideal for fast pipelines, enabling developers to automate UI tasks quickly and validate changes without heavy cross-browser overhead.
• JavaScript Teams: Fits teams working entirely in JavaScript or TypeScript, keeping tooling simple and tightly integrated with familiar Node.js environments.
• Chrome Features: Choose it when you need Chrome-specific capabilities like PDF creation, profiling, network interception, or detailed debugging insights.

When to Pick Selenium:

• Cross-Browser Reach: Select Selenium when your testing requires reliable coverage across Safari, Firefox, Edge and various operating system environments.
• Enterprise Fit: Strong choice for organizations with legacy systems, older browsers, existing test setups and long-established CI/CD infrastructure dependencies.
• Language Flexibility: Ideal when your engineering teams use multiple programming languages and need shared automation capabilities across different stacks.
• Parallel Testing: Works best for large suites requiring high-volume parallel execution supported by Selenium Grid or cloud infrastructure providers.

Scaling tests becomes challenging once your test suite grows beyond a few local runs. Running tests sequentially slows down development and delays feedback, especially for large test suites. Managing multiple browsers and environments locally adds complexity and infrastructure overhead.

How to Run Puppeteer and Selenium Tests in Parallel With TestMu AI?

Cloud-based automation testing platforms like TestMu AI enable parallel testing for both Puppeteer and Selenium by providing a cloud-based grid with thousands of real browsers and operating systems.

You can perform Puppeteer testing online and run tests with Selenium online across multiple test sessions simultaneously. This reduces test execution time, improving efficiency, and capturing logs, screenshots, and videos for easier debugging.

To get started, check out these guides: Puppeteer testing with TestMu AI and Selenium testing with TestMu AI.

Conclusion

The choice between Puppeteer vs Selenium fundamentally depends on your browser coverage requirements, team expertise, and performance priorities. Puppeteer excels as the modern, fast, Chrome-focused solution.

Its direct Chrome DevTools Protocol integration, minimal setup, and advanced features like native PDF generation make it perfect for environments where Chrome is the primary or only target browser.

Selenium remains the industry standard for comprehensive cross-browser testing, offering unmatched browser compatibility, multi-language support, and enterprise-grade infrastructure through Selenium Grid.

So, Selenium vs Puppeteer isn’t about which is better. It’s about which fits your exact use case.

Citations

• Puppeteer Official Documentation: https://pptr.dev/
• Selenium Official Documentation: https://selenium.dev/documentation/