Overview

Puppeteer

Stacks653

Followers582

Votes26

Playwright

Stacks541

Followers585

Votes81

GitHub Stars79.0K

Forks4.8K

Playwright vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?

Key differences between Playwright and Puppeteer

1. Cross-Browser Compatibility: Playwright supports multiple web browsers such as Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, allowing developers to test their applications across different browser engines. On the other hand, Puppeteer is limited to Chromium only, restricting the testing to a single browser engine.

2. Multi-Page Support: Playwright provides built-in support for working with multiple pages within a single browser context. This allows developers to easily navigate between various pages, open new tabs, and interact with multiple pages simultaneously. Puppeteer, however, does not have native multi-page support, requiring developers to handle multiple pages manually.

3. Event-Based Architecture: Playwright follows an event-driven architecture, which means it provides APIs to listen to various browser events. This allows developers to efficiently handle asynchronous operations, wait for specific events, and take actions accordingly. In contrast, Puppeteer utilizes a promise-based approach, which may not provide the same level of control and flexibility as an event-driven architecture.

4. Cross-Platform Support: Playwright is designed to work seamlessly on different operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. This allows developers to write code once and run their tests on various platforms without modification. Puppeteer, on the other hand, is primarily targeted towards Chromium-based browsers on desktop platforms and may not offer the same level of cross-platform compatibility.

5. Auto-Waiting: Playwright incorporates auto-waiting mechanisms, allowing it to automatically wait for various conditions to be fulfilled before executing the next step. This helps eliminate the need for explicit waits in code, making test scripts more concise and reliable. Puppeteer does not have built-in auto-waiting functionality, requiring developers to manually add wait statements for synchronization.

6. Recording and Playing Back Interactions: Playwright provides the ability to record user interactions and later play them back as part of automated tests. This feature can be particularly useful for generating test scripts by simply recording manual interactions with the application. Puppeteer does not have native support for recording and playing back interactions, requiring developers to implement this functionality manually.

In Summary, Playwright offers cross-browser compatibility, multi-page support, event-based architecture, cross-platform support, auto-waiting mechanisms, and recording and playing back interactions, which sets it apart from Puppeteer.

Advice on Puppeteer, Playwright

Ankur

Software Engineer

Dec 4, 2019

Needs advice

I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Puppeteer	Playwright
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.	It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.
-	Node library; Headless supported; Enables cross-browser web automation; Improved automated UI testing
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 79.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.8K
Stacks 653	Stacks 541
Followers 582	Followers 585
Votes 26	Votes 81
Pros & Cons
Pros 10 Very well documented 10 Scriptable web browser 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only	Pros 15 Cross browser 11 Open source 9 Test Runner with Playwright/test 7 Promise based 7 Well documented Cons 12 Less help 3 Node based 2 Does not execute outside of browser
Integrations
Node.js	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Puppeteer, Playwright?

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.

Selenium

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Sauce Labs

Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.

Karma

Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.

Rainforest QA

Rainforest gives you the reliability of a QA team and the speed of automation, without the hassle of managing a team or the pain of writing automated tests.

WebdriverIO

WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read.

TestingBot

TestingBot provides automated and Manual cross browser testing in the cloud. Make sure your website looks ok in all browsers.

Ghost Inspector

It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.