Compare Stillio to Playwright and Puppeteer

Web scraping and website screenshots are both increasingly massive sectors of the web development industry. Choosing the right tools for the job is an important decision to get right early.

What is Playwright, Puppeteer and Stillio?

Playwright and Puppeteer are both tools to spawn Headless Browsers in your code to automate actions that you might take as a human when physically browsing the web. Headless browsers are often used in a team's development workflow to automate tests of their UI code before launching a new version. Headless browsers are also often used to extract data or capture screenshots of live websites from their public URL.

Stillio is a service that has laser-beam focus on the screenshot aspect of the headless browser. The service has been meticulously crafted over many years to use the best of what Playwright or Puppeteer offers but also overcome the many, many challenges that are involved in grabbing a website screenshot.

We will compare the tools, so you can make the right decision for your next project.

Playwright benefits

Cross-browser - Playwright offers you the choice of WebKit, Firefox or Chromium browsers out of the box.
Multiple Languages - Playwright is flexible in which programming language you can use, offering Java, .NET, Node.js and Python - boasting a 'single API' for all.
Fast - In real-world apps Playwright performs better than many of its peers.
Codegen - Playwright offers the ability to record your physical browsing session and save it to test code for automation.

Playwright drawbacks

Technical knowledge - Although Playwright offers many programming languages, you still need to be proficient in at least one of them to use it.
Difficult to schedule - Often tests, scrapes or screenshots are run on a set schedule to compare or archive the info. With Playwright, you require a fairly complicated setup like Cron to accomplish this.
Easily blocked - Playwright enables a lot out of its default settings, but to overcome issues with fingerprinting, firewalls, popup walls etc. requires intense trial and error within the settings.

Puppeteer benefits

Multiple formats - Puppeteer allows screenshots in more formats, including webp.
Fast script execution - Puppeteer performs great when you provide custom Javascript.
Off-process - Makes it safe to process potentially dangerous sites.

Puppeteer drawbacks

Limited browsers - Only offers Chromium, with limited Firefox support. (They do plan on adding cross-browser).
Limited languages - Because of the V8 engine, Puppeteer focuses on Node.js and Chromium.
Limited screenshot options - offers significantly less configuration options when capturing a screenshot, except for file format.

Stillio benefits

Highly configurable - Offering many options like where the screenshot is taken (yes, by country), the size, the page manipulations, hiding cookie banners etc.
Use everywhere - Since Stillio is a SaaS, you have access from any device (even your television browser).
Capture entire sitemaps - Stillio allows you to add one link to capture an entire website.
Extremely Simple - At it's core, all you need is a URL and Stillio will do the rest.
Optimized to pass blocking - Years of trial and error makes Stillio one of the best tools to outsmart blocking measures.
Easy storage configuration - Automatically sync screenshots to your Google Drive, Dropbox or anything else with webhooks in a few clicks.
Scheduling - Take screenshots at any interval.

Stillio drawbacks

Limited testing capabilities - Testing is not a core focus of Stillio, so visual testing needs to be done by comparing images manually.
Only a free trial - Since Stillio is a SaaS, once your 14 day trial expires - you'll need to subscribe (but often this is less than cost of development anyway).

Compare	Playwright	Puppeteer	Stillio
Great for testing	✅	✅	❌
Scrape specific parts	✅	✅	🚧 Limited
Capture Screenshots	✅	✅	✅
Write custom JS / CSS into captures	✅	✅	✅
Extensive Scheduling	❌	❌	✅
Firewall bypass	❌	❌	✅
Cross-browser	✅	❌	✅
Capture entire websites with a single link	❌	❌	✅

Conclusion

If your goal is to scrape websites once-off to obtain a piece of data in text / html and you know the website is not heavily protected, then Playwright may be your best bet. If you're looking for a highly configurable automated screenshot tool and don't want to spend hours configuring code or fixing bugs - Stillio is your best bet. Especially if you just want to set-and-forget a URL and let captures run on a schedule - a great option for archiving.

Ready to start capturing websites? Try Stillio today

Playwright vs Puppeteer vs Stillio