Zombie.js and Node.io run on JSDOM, hence your options are either going with JSDOM (or any equivalent wrapper), a headless browser (PhantomJS, SlimerJS) or Cheerio.
- JSDOM is fairly slow because it has to recreate DOM and CSSOM in Node.js.
- PhantomJS/SlimerJS are proper headless browsers, thus performances are ok and those are also very reliable.
- Cheerio is a lightweight alternative to JSDOM. It doesn't recreate the entire page in Node.js (it just downloads and parses the DOM - no javascript is executed). Therefore you can't really click on buttons/links, but it's very fast to scrape webpages.
Given your requirements, I'd probably go with something like a headless browser. In particular, I'd choose CasperJS because it has a nice and expressive API, it's fast and reliable (it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel on how to parse and render the dom or css like JSDOM does) and it's very easy to interact with elements such as buttons and links.
Your workflow in CasperJS should look more or less like this:
casper.start();
casper
.then(function(){
console.log("Start:");
})
.thenOpen("https://www.domain.com/page1")
.then(function(){
// scrape something
this.echo(this.getHTML('h1#foobar'));
})
.thenClick("#button1")
.then(function(){
// scrape something else
this.echo(this.getHTML('h2#foobar'));
})
.thenClick("#button2")
thenOpen("http://myserver.com", {
method: "post",
data: {
my: 'data',
}
}, function() {
this.echo("data sent back to the server")
});
casper.run();