Selenium Alternative

The Selenium Alternative for Screenshots

WebDriver, browser drivers, and Grid clusters made sense for cross-browser testing in 2015. For screenshots in 2026, one HTTP request does it.

Selenium screenshots come with the heaviest toolchain of all: matching ChromeDriver versions to Chrome versions, WebDriver session management, and — at scale — a Selenium Grid cluster to operate. Full-page capture isn't even native; you stitch scrolls together or bolt on extensions.

Screenshotty replaces the entire stack with a single call that returns a true full-page capture from current Chrome, including content Selenium-era approaches miss: lazy-loaded images, web fonts, and infinite-scroll feeds.

Try a capture in the browser first

Before: Selenium (Python)

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless=new")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)  # hope the driver matches
try:
    driver.set_window_size(1280, 800)
    driver.get("https://example.com")
    driver.save_screenshot("screenshot.png")  # viewport only!
finally:
    driver.quit()

The same capture with Screenshotty (Python)

import requests

png = requests.get(
    "https://api.screenshotty.link/api/v1/screenshot",
    params={"url": "https://example.com", "full_page": True},
    headers={"X-Api-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
).content

open("screenshot.png", "wb").write(png)

Everything You Need, Built In

No driver matching

No ChromeDriver/geckodriver version matrix, no 'session not created' errors after a browser auto-update.

Native full-page capture

full_page=true with scroll_to_bottom handles what Selenium needs stitching hacks to approximate.

No Grid to operate

Parallelism is the API's problem: burst thousands of captures with webhook callbacks, zero hub/node maintenance.

Modern web ready

Shadow DOM, lazy loading, and SPA content render correctly in up-to-date headless Chrome.

Frequently Asked Questions

We already run Selenium for tests — why not reuse it for screenshots?

Reuse is tempting, but capture workloads have different needs: full-page output, clean pages (no ads/banners), high parallelism, and format options. Pointing production capture at your test grid couples two systems that fail differently and scales the more expensive one.

Does it handle pages that need login or custom headers?

Yes — pass cookies and http_headers with the request to capture authenticated or personalized pages.

What does it cost compared to self-hosting?

Screenshotty starts free (100 screenshots/month, no credit card) and paid plans start at $9/month for 2,500 screenshots with $0.004 pay-as-you-go overage. Self-hosting costs server capacity sized for Chrome's memory spikes plus the engineering time to keep browsers patched, warm, and stable — typically far more than the subscription for any non-trivial volume.

How hard is it to migrate?

Usually under an hour. Replace your capture function with one HTTP request — the viewport, full-page, wait-condition, and selector options you rely on are all API parameters. Your language guide (Python, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, Go, C#) has copy-paste examples.

Start Capturing in Minutes

100 free screenshots per month. No credit card required.

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

options.add_argument("--headless=new")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options) # hope the driver matches

try:

driver.set_window_size(1280, 800)

driver.get("https://example.com")

driver.save_screenshot("screenshot.png") # viewport only!

finally:

driver.quit()

import requests

png = requests.get(

"https://api.screenshotty.link/api/v1/screenshot",

params={"url": "https://example.com", "full_page": True},

headers={"X-Api-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},

).content

open("screenshot.png", "wb").write(png)