Playwright

Testing

Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps

weekly downloads30.9M

versionv1.58.2

licenseApache-2.0

Cross-browserAuto-waitCodegen + trace viewer

Overview

Playwright is a browser automation framework developed by Microsoft that provides a unified API for controlling Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers. With over 30 million weekly downloads, it's become one of the most popular tools for end-to-end testing and web automation tasks. The framework was built by the original Puppeteer team after they moved to Microsoft, addressing many limitations they encountered in previous automation tools.

The core value proposition is reliability through intelligent design. Playwright eliminates the most common causes of flaky tests by automatically waiting for elements to be ready before interacting with them, retrying assertions until conditions are met, and providing complete test isolation through browser contexts. Each context acts as an incognito-like profile that's created in milliseconds, allowing parallel test execution without state leakage between tests.

Playwright is used by development teams ranging from startups to enterprises for automated testing, continuous integration pipelines, web scraping, screenshot generation, and automated user workflows. It supports both JavaScript and TypeScript natively, with additional bindings for Python, .NET, and Java. The framework includes built-in test runners, debugging tools like Trace Viewer and Codegen, and integrates seamlessly with popular CI/CD platforms.

Quick Start

typescript

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  const page = await context.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://github.com/login');
  
  await page.fill('input[name="login"]', 'user@example.com');
  await page.fill('input[name="password"]', 'password123');
  await page.click('input[type="submit"]');
  
  await page.waitForURL('https://github.com/**');
  
  const isLoggedIn = await page.locator('[data-test="user-menu"]').isVisible();
  console.log('Login successful:', isLoggedIn);
  
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'dashboard.png', fullPage: true });
  
  await page.route('**/api/user/profile', route => {
    route.fulfill({
      status: 200,
      body: JSON.stringify({ name: 'Test User', premium: true })
    });
  });
  
  await page.goto('https://github.com/settings/profile');
  
  await context.storageState({ path: 'auth-state.json' });
  
  await browser.close();
})();

Use Cases

End-to-end testing: Automate user flows across your web application, simulating real user interactions like filling forms, clicking buttons, and navigating pages. Playwright's auto-wait and retry mechanisms make these tests more stable than traditional Selenium-based approaches.

Cross-browser compatibility testing: Run the same test suite across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to catch browser-specific bugs early. Playwright handles browser differences internally, so you write tests once without browser-specific workarounds.

Visual regression testing: Capture screenshots of pages or components at different viewport sizes and compare them against baselines to detect unintended visual changes. Playwright's consistent rendering across browsers makes visual testing reliable.

Authenticated workflows and session management: Test features behind authentication by recording login state once and reusing it across all tests. This dramatically speeds up test suites that would otherwise repeat login steps hundreds of times.

API testing and network manipulation: Intercept and modify network requests to test error states, mock API responses, or verify that your application makes correct backend calls. Playwright can mock, block, or modify any network traffic during test execution.

Pros & Cons

Pros

+Automatic waiting eliminates most timing-related flakiness without manual wait statements or arbitrary timeouts
+Browser contexts provide true test isolation with minimal overhead, enabling fast parallel execution
+Built-in test runner with excellent debugging tools including trace viewer, video recording, and step-through execution
+Supports modern web features like Shadow DOM, iframes, service workers, and handles multiple tabs/origins naturally
+Active development by Microsoft with frequent updates and strong community support

Cons

−Steeper learning curve compared to simpler tools like Puppeteer if you only need basic Chrome automation
−Larger installation size since it downloads browser binaries (~300-400MB per browser) by default
−Test execution can be slower than unit tests, making it impractical for testing every code path at the E2E level
−Browser contexts, while isolated, share the same browser process which can cause issues if tests crash the browser
−Documentation, while comprehensive, can be overwhelming for developers new to browser automation concepts

Comparisons

playwright vs cypresstesting →

Install

bash

npm install playwright

bash

pnpm add playwright

bash

bun add playwright

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