Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Which is faster? Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium
Hey Everyone, I just ran a [rather silly] race between Puppeteer (JS), Playwright (Python) and Selenium (Python) to see which one would be fastest on a simple scrape (using Google Colab so you can also run it) Far from a comprehensive benchmark, this race is 100% free from advanced configurations, multi-threading or anything complicated. It just opens Wallapop (a second hand marketplace in Spain) and times how long it takes to extract the first 2000 results of a search. If you like this simple format, have any ideas on how to improve a race like this or have a strong urge to prove Ward…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier. Which is faster? Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Chrome Extension for playwright and web scraping
2023 · ray.run · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, This is Jan, founder of Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. Drawing on our team's years of experience, today we're launching Crawlee [1], the web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js that's designed for the fastest development and maximum reliability in production. For details, see the short video [2] or read the announcement blog post [3]. Main features: - Supports headless browsers with Playwright or Puppeteer - Supports raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM - Automated parallelization and scaling of crawlers for best performance - Avoids blocking using…
2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →
- 3IC
I created this tool a few months ago to automate some of my tasks. I use it to collect prices and files and to get notified when something changes on certain websites. The task runner uses Playwright. I'm not sure if it can be useful to anybody else besides me :) Any feedback is welcome.
2022 · rocketride.io · its alternatives →
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Blacksmithfree tier, from $0.0025/mo▲105Faster and cheaper hosted GitHub Actions runners
2024 · blacksmith.sh · its alternatives →
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Owl Browser▲145I've been working on browser automation infrastructure for a while and kept hitting the same ceiling: Playwright and Puppeteer are great for scripting but fall apart when you need stealth at scale. Cloud-based solutions like Browserbase work but you're sending all your data to a third party and can't control the environment. So we built Owl Browser, a self-hosted Chromium-based engine that runs in a single Docker container. The core technical problem we tried to solve was fingerprint consistency. Most browser automation tools either ignore fingerprinting entirely or apply surface-level…
Jan 2026 · owlbrowser.net · its alternatives →
- 7DR
I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…
2022 · its alternatives →
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RunsOnfree tier, from $300/mo▲14210x cheaper GitHub Actions runners, self-hosted on AWS
2024 · runs-on.com · its alternatives →
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We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We've been trying to evaluate web scraping companies, but when you look at their benchmarks, you can't verify anything, and they mostly exist to prove the company is successful. They put somewhere between 98% and 100% because they pick their own urls, define success their own way, and don't publish the harness. We also saw companies like scrapfly astroturf websites like scrapeway and call them independent. So, we built an open source benchmark that we want to represent the frontier of web data. We're trying to look across all major anti-bot providers and industries, to build a comprehensive…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Getting started with Puppeteer and Chrome Headless for Web Scraping - emadehsan/thal
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13CD
2023 · ray.run · its alternatives →
- 14IM
Hi! I made a React compatibility library for a Virtual DOM library (https://github.com/aidenybai/million). The idea is to have much faster rendering (a compiler optimizes virtual DOM beforehand) while ensuring the same developer experience React provides. This is very, VERY early stage, so be prepared for weird bugs / plugin incompatibility / etc. If you have any suggestions, I'd be more than happy if you replied in a comment with it! You can spin up the demo here >> https://stackblitz.com/github/aidenybai/million-react-compat
2022 · its alternatives →
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Jsblocks▲97Faster than AngularJS and ReactJS. Better MV-ish Framework.
2015 · jsblocks.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN, I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on for a while: Browser4. The motivation came from a recurring frustration: most browser automation tools (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer) are excellent for human-written scripts, but start to show friction when used as a core execution layer for AI agents or at very high concurrency. So instead of building “another wrapper around Playwright”, we experimented with a different direction: designing a browser engine where AI agents are first-class citizens. ### What Browser4 is Browser4 is a browser automation engine built on…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance). We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple tasks could take minutes and cost dollars in API credits. We started as users of Browser Use, but the pain was obvious. So we built something better. Smooth is 5x faster, 7x cheaper, and more reliable. And along the way, we discovered two principles that make agents actually work.…
2025 · smooth.sh · its alternatives →
- 18IM
I found a serious bottleneck in Python binding of Wasmer and Wasmtime and I found a trick to make 25x faster. Then beat all that using NumPy.
2023 · medium.com · its alternatives →
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Full reactivity JS/TS framework. Lightweight replacement of React + MobX + React Router. Very small and fast !! - PxyUp/Revact
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, We’ve all accepted the "Python tax"—you trade execution speed for developer happiness. But what if that trade-off was a thing of the past? I just came across BustAPI, and it’s basically a "cheat code" for Python web services. It’s not just another wrapper; it’s a hybrid engine that embeds a Rust (Actix-Web) core directly into the Python runtime. Is this the end of the "slow Python" era? The benchmarks are pretty shocking. I’d love to see someone stress-test this against a production-grade Go or Node.js setup. Repo: https://github.com/GrandpaEJ/BustAPI Benchmarks:…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Elemental makes Selenium automation faster and easier. - red-and-black/elemental
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22CH
There is a growing number of companies offering anti-bot protection SaaS to protect websites from scraping by automated bots based on Puppeteer/Selenium. Most of them rely on browser properties such as headers, javascript properties (window., navigator.), behavior analysis, to build device/user fingerprints and match it against a database of "whitelisted" fingerprints (typical user behavior/settings/device props etc). For the past few months, together with two other devs I have worked on a customized Puppeteer/Playwright scraping backend. It's essentially a drop-in…
2021 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Ah yes, another web scraper. There are so many out there, so why make another one? Because I wanted one that's stupid simple and stupid fast. Unlike most web scrapers, Easy Scraper doesn’t make you build a new scraper for each site or individually select fields. You just open it and bam, your data's ready to go. My favorite use case for instantly extracting data anywhere is being able to easily talk to ChatGPT about custom datasets. For example, here's a 1-minute demo of me scraping my Twitter followers to find the ones that live in San Francisco:…
2024 · easyscraper.com · its alternatives →
- 24FO
Recently, I saw few Python accelerators getting a lot of attention, and I thought it would be a good time to finally present the project that we will make available to test in the upcoming days. Flyable is an ahead-of-time compiler that takes your Python code, analyses it, and outputs very optimized machine code. Micro-benchmarks show that it produces programs that run between 10-70x time faster than Python. Flyable is certainly one of the fastest and easiest ways to accelerate your Python code. It finally allows Python to compete in the ring of fast and efficient languages without having to…
2020 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →