Puppeteer 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

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.

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