splashvsrod
Splash is a javascript rendering service with an HTTP API. It's a lightweight browser with an HTTP API, implemented in Python 3 using Twisted and QT5.
It is built on top of the QtWebkit library and allows developers to interact with web pages in a headless mode, which means that the web pages are rendered in the background, without displaying them on the screen.
splash is particularly useful for web scraping and web testing tasks, as it allows developers to interact with web pages in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.
It also allows you to execute javascript and interact with web pages even if they use heavy javascript.
Unlike Selenium or Playwright, splash is powered by webkit embedded browser instead of a real browser like Chrome or Firefox. As a down-side splash requests are easy to detect and block when scraping websites with anti-scraping features.
One benefit of splash is that it seemlesly integrates with Scrapy.
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.