skyvernvssplash
Skyvern is an AI-powered browser automation tool that uses large language models (LLMs) and computer vision to interact with websites. Instead of relying on DOM selectors, Skyvern takes screenshots of web pages and uses visual understanding to identify and interact with elements, making it highly resilient to website changes.
Key features include:
- Vision-based interaction Uses screenshots and computer vision (multimodal LLMs) to understand page layout and identify interactive elements visually, rather than through DOM inspection alone.
- No selectors needed Describe tasks in natural language and Skyvern figures out what to click, type, and navigate without CSS selectors or XPath.
- Complex workflow automation Can handle multi-step workflows like form filling, navigation through menus, file uploads, and multi-page processes.
- Self-correcting When actions fail, Skyvern can analyze the resulting page state and adjust its approach, recovering from errors autonomously.
- API-first design Provides a REST API for triggering and managing automation tasks programmatically.
- Open source with cloud option Core engine is open source and can be self-hosted. Also available as a managed cloud service.
Skyvern is particularly effective for automating tasks on websites with complex or dynamic UIs where traditional selector-based automation breaks frequently. It achieved 85.85% accuracy on the WebVoyager benchmark.
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.