Playwright is an open-source framework for cross-browser automation and end-to-end web application testing. It was developed by Microsoft to provide a fast, reliable, and robust test automation solution.

Playwright has a lot of use cases.

Use cases

End-to-End (E2E) Testing

Playwright allows you to write reliable end-to-end tests for modern web applications. It can automate interactions with web pages, including clicking, typing, navigating, and asserting on page content.

Cross-Browser Testing

Playwright supports all major rendering engines, including Chromium, WebKit (Safari), and Firefox. This allows you to test your web application’s compatibility across different browsers and platforms.

Web Scraping

Playwright can be used to automate web scraping tasks, allowing you to extract data from websites programmatically.

Mobile Web Testing

Playwright provides native mobile emulation for Google Chrome on Android and Mobile Safari, enabling you to test your web application’s mobile experience.

Parallel Testing

Playwright supports running tests in parallel across multiple browser contexts, improving test execution speed. [2][3]

Debugging and Tracing

Playwright offers built-in debugging tools, such as the Playwright Inspector and Trace Viewer, to help you investigate and troubleshoot test failures.

Code examples

The following is an example of using the Playwright Library directly to launch Chromium, go to a page, and check its title:

import { chromium, devices } from 'playwright';
import assert from 'node:assert';

(async () => {
  // Setup
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext(devices['iPhone 11']);
  const page = await context.newPage();

  // The actual interesting bit
  await context.route('**.jpg', route => route.abort());
  await page.goto('https://example.com/');

  assert(await page.title() === 'Example Domain'); // 👎 not a Web First assertion

  // Teardown
  await context.close();
  await browser.close();
})();

Playwright alternatives

Puppeteer can be considered an alternative to Playwright for browser automation and web scraping tasks. While they have some differences, both Puppeteer and Playwright are powerful Node.js libraries that enable developers to automate interactions with web pages.

But the main difference is the purpose of libraries. Puppeteer is more of an abstraction of a browser, while Playwright is a testing framework and most of their differences arise from there.

Summary

Playwright is a powerful and versatile framework that enables developers to write reliable, cross-browser, and end-to-end tests for their modern web applications. It is designed to be fast, resilient, and easy to use, making it a popular choice for web automation and testing.