Day 250: Browser Automation Tools

product

As I’ve been working on Browserflow, I’ve been compiling a list of tools in the automation and scraping space. Here they are:

Browser Automation Tools

Task automation

Lead Generation

Website Monitoring

Testing

Scraping

I find new ones on a near-daily basis, and it’s amazing how many products exist that do similar things. I built Browserflow to be general purpose so that it can be used for task automation just as well as it can be used for scraping, but sometimes I wonder whether making it so broad might hurt adoption because it’s not as easy to communicate what it can do.

I’ve tried a bunch of services from this list, and some of them make me feel good about Browserflow because the product is whack while others inspire the heck out of me. One of my favorites is Reflect. When I encounter an edge case in Browserflow, I’ll try it out on several different services to see if they support it and Reflect continually surprises me with how robust it is.

For example, here are two scenarios that most action recorders don’t support properly:

  • When the user hovers over a button which activates a menu that they click on, the recorder needs to record the hover action before recording a click

    • Most services get this wrong and don’t register the hover event at all, but Reflect does it perfectly

  • When the user clicks on an element in an iframe, the action should be recorded for the element in the iframe, not the iframe itself

Playing around with Reflect makes me happy because it’s clear that the creators put a ton of care into make it incredibly robust. Goals!