Autify vs Puppeteer
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Quote-based annual contracts sized by test runs.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Two-week free trial.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Autify, Inc. · since 2016
Widely used
Google · since 2017
Strengths
- Very low barrier to a first working suite — recording plus a managed browser cloud.
- Maintenance burden is genuinely reduced by the self-healing model.
- Covers web and native mobile from one vendor.
- Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
- First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
- Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.
Limitations
- No self-hosted option.
- Limited support for complex data-driven scenarios.
- Smaller international presence and support footprint than the US vendors.
- No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
- Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
- For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.
Best for
Small QA teams that need automation without an engineering hire.
Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.