Is phantomjs-prebuilt still maintained?

No — phantomjs-prebuilt stopped being maintained around March 2018. The ecosystem moved to puppeteer, a separate project that took over the same job.

• replacement project
• high confidence
• package successor

What should I use instead of phantomjs-prebuilt?

The ecosystem moved to puppeteer, a separate project that took over the same job. puppeteer is not a drop-in replacement, so expect to change call sites.

How to migrate from phantomjs-prebuilt to puppeteer

Scripts that shelled out to the PhantomJS binary generally become puppeteer.launch() plus page.goto(); there is no PhantomJS-compatible API surface to keep.

Why phantomjs-prebuilt is on this list

PhantomJS development was suspended in March 2018 once Chrome and Firefox shipped headless modes, and both the phantomjs-prebuilt npm package and its Medium/phantomjs repository are deprecated and archived. The older unscoped phantomjs package carries a notice pointing at phantomjs-prebuilt, so it is equally dead. Puppeteer downloads and drives a headless Chrome build in the same way phantomjs-prebuilt downloaded a PhantomJS binary.

The succession is settled: primary sources agree and the ecosystem has already moved.

phantomjs-prebuilt alternatives

Beyond the primary recommendation, these are credible for phantomjs-prebuilt's use case:

• playwright — view on npm
• chrome-launcher — view on npm

Check your own project for phantomjs-prebuilt

npx dead-deps --all --min-state unmaintained

Run that in the directory holding your lockfile. If phantomjs-prebuilt is anywhere in your tree — a direct dependency or buried under something else — it appears in the report with this verdict, this successor and the same evidence links, alongside anything else that has stopped moving. Nothing is uploaded; the scan reads your lockfile locally and queries public registry metadata.

Exit code 1 means something was flagged, which makes npx dead-deps --min-state deprecated usable as a CI gate. See how verdicts are produced.

Evidence

Every claim on this page traces to a primary source. Check them:

• npm deprecation notice on phantomjs-prebuiltnpmjs.com
• PhantomJS issue 15344: archiving the project, suspending development (March 2018)github.com
• Medium/phantomjs repository (archived)github.com

Packages related to phantomjs-prebuilt

• casperjsReplacement project: playwright · unmaintained since March 2018
• nightmareReplacement project: playwright · unmaintained since April 2019
• puppeteer-firefoxAbsorbed elsewhere: puppeteer · unmaintained since January 2020
• protractorReplacement project: @playwright/test · unmaintained since April 2021
• connect-multipartyReplacement project: multer · unmaintained since September 2018

See the full index of covered packages, or read the methodology for how a verdict is reached and why a quiet package is not a dead one.