Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium programmatically via the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). It supports page navigation, click simulation, form filling, screenshot and PDF generation, network request interception, and JavaScript evaluation in the page context.
Puppeteer was the first widely adopted headless Chrome automation library and established many patterns that Playwright later built on. Its API is well-documented, has a large ecosystem of plugins (including `puppeteer-extra` with stealth plugins), and remains widely used in scraping pipelines. It is Chromium-only — unlike Playwright which also supports Firefox and WebKit.
For scraping purposes, Puppeteer and Playwright are functionally equivalent for most use cases. Puppeteer's browser compatibility plugin ecosystem is mature and battle-tested. AlterLab abstracts both behind a unified API — developers do not interact with Puppeteer directly but benefit from its rendering capabilities without managing a headless Chrome infrastructure.