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Playwright vs other automation frameworks

There are a number of options when for frameworks for end-to-end testing. If you’re thinking about using Checkly, you’re likely aware of a few.

The resemblance to Google’s Puppeteer is striking, and for good reason.

In the words of the authors:

We are the same team that originally built Puppeteer at Google […]. With Playwright, we’d like to take it one step further and offer the same functionality for all the popular rendering engines. We’d like to see Playwright vendor-neutral and shared governed.

In short, Playwright builds on the experience of Puppeteer to provide a way to:

1. run against all major browsers (Chromium/Chrome, Firefox, WebKit/Safari)
2. write more concise scripts (e.g. minimising the need for explicit waits)
3. easily migrate existing codebases (keeping a very similar API)

This is achieved in the form of a compact node library that exposes a high-level API to interact with web pages in a fast, secure, stable and simple way. As it is an open-source project, you can contribute to it yourself.

Long the dominant framework for (at the time) modern end-to-end testing, Cypress is still very widely used as a testing framework by front-end focused teams.

Due to architectural differences, Playwright can support multiple languages for writing tests, and run more browsers for testing. Due to Playwright’s status as a free and open source project, users don’t have to deal with new features being paywalled, a significant issue for Cypress users since 2023.

Read more about Playwright vs. Cypress.