you're building another end-user product or library atop of DevTools protocol.However, you should use puppeteer-core if: In most cases, you'll be fine using the puppeteer package. puppeteer-core ignores all PUPPETEER_* env variables.puppeteer-core doesn't automatically download Chromium when installed.To sum up, the only differences between puppeteer-core and puppeteer are: Being a library, puppeteer-core is fully driven through its programmatic interface and disregards all the PUPPETEER_* env variables. puppeteer-core doesn't download Chromium when installed.

Puppeteer-core is a library to help drive anything that supports DevTools protocol. Being an end-user product, puppeteer supports a bunch of convenient PUPPETEER_* env variables to tweak its behavior.

When installed, it downloads a version of Chromium, which it then drives using puppeteer-core. Puppeteer is a product for browser automation. (Diagram source: link) puppeteer vs puppeteer-coreĮvery release since v1.7.0 we publish two packages:

Worker has a single execution context and facilitates interacting with WebWorkers.A Frame might have additional execution contexts that are associated with extensions. Frame has at least one execution context - the default execution context - where the frame's JavaScript is executed.There might be other frames created by iframe or frame tags. Page has at least one frame: main frame.BrowserContext instance defines a browsing session and can own multiple pages.Browser instance can own multiple browser contexts.Puppeteer communicates with the browser using DevTools Protocol.NOTE On the following diagram, faded entities are not currently represented in Puppeteer. The Puppeteer API is hierarchical and mirrors the browser structure. Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chromium or Chrome over the DevTools Protocol.

Puppeteer docs download free