Nightwatch.js vs Playwright

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. Microsoft also sells a hosted parallel-runner service; the library itself has no paid tier.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• Everything included: runner, assertions, page objects, reporting, parallelism.
• Very readable chained syntax that non-specialists pick up quickly.
• Tight BrowserStack integration if you already use that cloud.

• Auto-waiting and web-first assertions remove most of the sleep() flake that plagues older tools.
• The trace viewer — DOM snapshots, network, console and screenshots per step — is the best failure triage in the category.
• True WebKit support, so Safari bugs are caught on Linux CI without a Mac.

• Community is a fraction of Playwright's or Cypress's; fewer answers exist for edge cases.
• WebDriver-based, so it carries the usual latency and waiting caveats.
• Corporate stewardship by a device-cloud vendor is worth weighing if you plan to use a competitor.

• No native mobile app support. Mobile means an emulated viewport, not a real device.
• The API surface is large; teams without a conventions document end up with four ways to write the same locator.
• Component testing is still experimental compared to the E2E runner.

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.

Teams that write their own tests and want the lowest-flake open-source option available.