For me so far the most pleasant to work with has (contrary to its name) been Nightmare (http://www.nightmarejs.org/), which is a Node.js library that drives Electron. It has a really pleasant API and its developers claim that it is faster than PhantomJS. Unlike PhantomJS, however, it is not truly headless; it needs an X server like xvfb to run.

While not actually a real-life browser, Phantom 2.5 is _much_ closer to a real-life browser engine than it was previously.

I write tests using chromedriver. Ends up being really simple to write, and if I want to debug something, it's just a chrome instance that I can use normally if I make the tests wait.

Only downside is you have to make it run with xvfb on the CI server, but that's pretty easy to set up in your config file usually.

Is headless Chrome working yet?

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headle...

It works, but there are a number of issues in the remote control protocol.

(note: I am developing a python wrapper for controlling it: https://github.com/fake-name/ChromeController )

I've been meaning to see about wrapping the C++ api as a python module, but not had time.

You can also run Chrome inside a docker container and drive it with the remote driver. Handy if you are running on an aws Linux instance with no X