Puppeteer is an API library that allows controlling Chrome/Chromium to automate tasks like screenshot capturing, generating PDFs, e2e testing, crawling websites, and pre-rendering SPAs. It can be used to replace tools like PhantomJS, prerender.io, and Selenium. Puppeteer launches a Chromium instance in headless mode and controls it through code to perform automated tasks like taking screenshots, generating PDFs from websites, running e2e tests with frameworks like Jest, and crawling pages by extracting element content. It is maintained by Google and useful for tasks like pre-rendering React sites with react-snap.