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seleniumvsrod

python browser-automation
go browser-automation
Apache-2.0 198 30 34,072
54.1 million (month) Apr 25 2008 4.43.0(2026-04-10 06:47:01 ago)
6,853 3 202 MIT
Sep 23 2022 v0.116.2(2024-07-12 11:52:28 ago)

Selenium is a Python package that allows developers to automate web browsers. It provides a way for developers to interact with web browsers programmatically, simulating user interactions such as clicking links, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. Selenium can be used to automate tasks such as web scraping, testing web applications, and automating repetitive tasks on websites.

Selenium is built on top of WebDriver, which is a browser automation API that allows Selenium to interact with web browsers. Selenium supports a wide variety of web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

One of the main advantages of Selenium is that it can be used with many different programming languages, not only Python, and it also supports different platforms.

The package also provide a set of APIs that allows you to interact with web pages, you can locate elements, interact with them, get their properties and interact with javascript, you can use the APIs to automate the browser and interact with web pages in the same way a human user would.

Selenium is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks because it allows developers to automate web browsers in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.

Overall, Selenium is a powerful and versatile tool for automating web browsers and is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks.

Rod is a high-level Go library for browser automation built on the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). It provides a simpler and more intuitive API compared to chromedp, making it easier to write browser automation and web scraping scripts in Go.

Key features include:

  • Simple API Rod's API is designed to be intuitive and requires less boilerplate than chromedp. Common operations like clicking, typing, and waiting are straightforward single-line calls.
  • Auto-wait Automatically waits for elements to be ready before interacting with them, reducing the need for explicit wait statements and making scripts more reliable.
  • Page pool Built-in page pool for managing multiple browser pages efficiently, useful for concurrent scraping tasks.
  • Stealth mode Includes a stealth plugin (rod/lib/launcher/flags) that can disable common automation detection vectors.
  • Element screenshots Can take screenshots of specific elements, not just full pages.
  • Network interception Supports hijacking network requests and responses for modification or monitoring.
  • Input emulation Realistic mouse and keyboard input emulation for interacting with complex web applications.

Rod is the recommended choice for new Go browser automation projects due to its simpler API and active maintenance. It is comparable to Playwright in terms of developer experience but native to the Go ecosystem.

Highlights

cdpfast

Example Use

```python from selenium import webdriver # Create an instance of the webdriver driver = webdriver.Firefox() # Navigate to a website driver.get("http://www.example.com") # Find an element by its id element = driver.find_element_by_id("example-id") # Interact with the element element.click() # Find an element by its name element = driver.find_element_by_name("example-name") # Fill an input form element.send_keys("example text") # Find and click a button driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[text()='Search']").click() # Wait for the page to load driver.implicitly_wait(10) # Get the page title print(driver.title) # Close the browser driver.close() ```
```go package main import ( "fmt" "github.com/go-rod/rod" "github.com/go-rod/rod/lib/launcher" ) func main() { // Launch browser url := launcher.New().Headless(true).MustLaunch() browser := rod.New().ControlURL(url).MustConnect() defer browser.MustClose() // Navigate and auto-wait for the page to load page := browser.MustPage("https://example.com") page.MustWaitStable() // Find elements and extract text - auto-waits for element title := page.MustElement("h1").MustText() fmt.Println("Title:", title) // Fill in a form page.MustElement("input[name='search']").MustInput("web scraping") page.MustElement("button[type='submit']").MustClick() // Wait for results and extract page.MustWaitStable() results := page.MustElements(".result-item") for _, el := range results { text := el.MustText() href := el.MustElement("a").MustProperty("href").String() fmt.Printf("Result: %s (%s)\n", text, href) } // Take screenshot of specific element page.MustElement(".results").MustScreenshot("results.png") } ```

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