TestCafe 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

DevExpress · since 2016

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• Zero setup: no drivers, no browser downloads, works on any installed browser including mobile Safari on a real phone.
• Automatic waiting and stable selectors with very little configuration.
• Genuinely simple concurrency flag for parallel runs.

• 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.

• The proxy architecture occasionally breaks on apps with strict CSP, service workers or unusual auth flows.
• Smaller community and slower ecosystem growth than Playwright or Cypress.
• No component testing story.

• 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.

Small teams who want a working cross-browser suite with the least possible setup.

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