What is the best alternative to NW.js (w/xvfb)?
Pro Used in many open source projects
Including bootstrap, grunt, ember.js, and YUI.
Pro Supports many browser standards
PhantomJS has full DOM and CSS parsing, JSON, canvas, and SVG support.
Con Browser closes unexpectedly
It often happens when running on more then 5 (my measurement) JVM instances that the browser gets stuck and quits unexpectedly. This can be partially solved by running the instances one by one instead of parallel (this is a problem when testing Jenkins and Bamboo agents) but I don't believe th...
Con Elements are sometimes not visible
This is an error which occurs with almost no reason, PhantomJS sometimes decides that it cannot click the element even though the element is intractable or enabled. This happens if you have to scroll to see the element (and these are not pages that load elements with JavaScript) which is strange b...
Con Heavy setup
You'll often end up having PhantomJS binaries connected via WebDriver to your testing framework, possibly using client/server especially if you want your test running with something else than Java. This mean an overhead in terms or maintenance and performance, but still usually lighter than run...
Pro Backed by Facebook
Facebook writes their mobile apps in React Native so the code base gets pretty thoroughly used in some highly demanding scenarios.
Pro Allows you to develop native apps
React Native allows you to create native apps by generating native views with JavaScript instead of using a web wrapper.
Pro More predictable control of the state
The one way data flow, makes it more predictable and easy to control.
Con If core team doesn't use a certain feature, it's not developed
Whenever there's functionality you need that they don't use in their apps, it's not going to get developed by them, even if it's obvious it should be in the core. They always say to either submit a PR or create a separate module.
Con Steep learning curve
React Native is not the most beginner-friendly framework for creating mobile apps with JavaScript. It requires that the developer know React, which is known to have a steep learning curve.
Pro Runs on Node.js
Zombie is built on node.js, making it very easy to integrate with your project and into your testing toolchain. It only requires JavaScript to run.
Pro Fully featured api based interaction and assertion
The way the api is built makes it very easy to add to your test framework.
Pro Claims to be "Insanely Fast"
It's a lot faster than fully fletched browsers and a lot lighter. Partly because it really only focuses on headless loading of pages along with their JavaScript (not taking really care of rendering or more visual resources).
Con Support has waned
As of August 19, 2016, Zombie hasn't received a commit since January 2016. Issues get comments like "patch welcome".
Con Stale documentation
Full API documentation has been missing since the start, making it frustrating to use.
Con Fails to load many sites
As its JavaScript and DOM engine are mostly "just good enough" and because by design it'll report all errors and stop there, many complex sites will not load properly through Zombie.js.
Pro Active development
Electron receives updates frequently (multiple times each month). For example, the recent updates (as of July 15, 2016) are: 1.2.6 (released July 6) 1.2.5 (released June 23) 1.2.4 (released June 22) 1.2.3 (released June 16) 1.2.2 (released June 8)
Pro Healthy community
Github is behind electron and there is a lot of big companies using it to make their cross platform apps.
Pro Great documentation
Electron has a nice website with great documentation. It also features a lot of samples.
Con Apps can have memory issues
Apps made with Electron are likely to have memory issues unless you specifically design the app with efficient coding.
Pro Easy to use
Easy to make compiled native apps.
Con Subscription-based/Not free
Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology.
Con No Android support
They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS.
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