As our product BlueworksLive is undergoing a major modernisation—embracing a sleek new look and a more fluid, dynamic UI—we quickly realised that our legacy test automation framework would struggle to keep up, prompting us to explore more robust and modern alternatives. After evaluating several leading frameworks including Selenium, Cypress, and Robot Framework, we discovered Playwright. Playwright emerged as the all-round winner, offering the reliability, speed, and flexibility we needed to match our evolving application. In this blog, I’ll walk you through different features of Playwright, the comparisons we made, and why Playwright stood out as the best fit for our needs.
Meet Playwright: The Modern Testing Powerhouse
Playwright is a modern, cross-platform testing framework built for speed, reliability, and versatility. With its core promise—“Any browser. Any platform. One API”, it simplifies testing across browsers and operating systems. It supports multiple languages, integrates well with CI/CD pipelines, and even enables mobile web testing—making it a solid choice for teams working with dynamic, responsive applications.
Key Features That Make Playwright Stand Out
Playwright distinguishes itself through a suite of powerful features meticulously designed for modern web testing.
Unrivalled Cross-Browser Compatibility
Playwright provides robust support for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, ensuring comprehensive test coverage across the primary browser engines utilised by the vast majority of internet users. By default, Playwright leverages open-source Chromium builds, granting testers an advantage by enabling testing against the latest browser functionalities, often before they are officially released in stable versions of Chrome and Edge. Furthermore, it offers the flexibility to conduct tests on specific branded versions of Chrome and Edge that are already installed on the testing machine. This deep level of browser support guarantees that web applications function consistently and reliably across various browser environments, delivering thorough test coverage and ensuring a uniform user experience.
Versatile Language Support
Playwright reaffirms its commitment to flexibility by supporting a wide array of programming languages, including JavaScript and TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET. Some sources also indicate support for Ruby. The use of TypeScript for Playwright's development provides significant advantages for JavaScript and TypeScript users, such as enhanced IntelliSense support within Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), leading to faster and more efficient test development. Moreover, comprehensive documentation and active communities are available for each supported language, facilitating the learning process and simplifying troubleshooting. This broad language support promotes collaboration among teams with diverse technical backgrounds and streamlines the integration of test automation into existing development workflows.
Rock-Solid Reliability
Playwright incorporates an intelligent Auto-wait mechanism that automatically waits for elements to become actionable before attempting any interactions. This eliminates the need for explicit wait commands, which are often a source of test flakiness in other automation frameworks. Furthermore, Playwright offers Web-First Assertions, specifically designed for the dynamic nature of modern web applications. These assertions automatically retry checks until the necessary conditions are met or a predefined timeout is reached, further enhancing test stability and reducing flakiness. Playwright also provides powerful debugging tools, including configurable test retry strategies, execution trace capture, and video and screenshot capabilities, which significantly aid in diagnosing and resolving the root causes of test failures. By directly addressing the common causes of test flakiness through these built-in mechanisms, Playwright significantly improves the reliability and maintainability of test suites.
Blazing Fast Performance
Playwright boasts a modern architecture that aligns with the structure of contemporary web browsers. It executes tests out-of-process, thereby circumventing the limitations often associated with in-process test runners. The framework utilizes a single WebSocket connection to communicate with all browser drivers, a more efficient method compared to the multiple HTTP requests employed by some other tools, resulting in faster command execution and reduced latency. Playwright leverages isolated Browser Contexts for each test, which are lightweight and can be created almost instantaneously, providing complete test isolation with minimal performance overhead and facilitating efficient parallel test execution. Furthermore, Playwright offers excellent support for Parallel Testing, enabling the simultaneous execution of tests across multiple worker processes, which significantly reduces the overall test execution time, particularly for large test suites. It even allows for the parallelization of tests within a single test file. For even greater scalability and speed with very large test suites, Playwright supports sharding tests across multiple machines. This architectural design underscores Playwright's commitment to speed and efficiency, making it a highly performant framework suitable for projects where rapid feedback and short test execution times are crucial.
Powerful Built-in Tools for Developers
Playwright comes equipped with a suite of powerful built-in tools designed to enhance the developer and tester experience. Codegen enables the automatic generation of test code by recording user interactions directly in the browser, with the option to save the code in various supported programming languages. The Playwright Inspector provides a user-friendly graphical interface for inspecting page elements, generating robust and reliable selectors, stepping through test execution to understand the flow, visualising click points, and exploring execution logs for effective debugging and test development. The Trace Viewer is an invaluable tool for capturing and analysing detailed test execution traces, including a complete screencast of the test, live DOM snapshots at each step, an action explorer to review performed actions, and the test source code, providing deep insights for diagnosing test failures. Playwright also includes built-in HTML Test Reports that offer a clear and detailed summary of test execution results, allowing for filtering by browser and test status. Furthermore, it supports various default reporters and integrates with third-party reporting tools like Allure, providing flexibility in how test results are presented and analysed. These integrated tools significantly enhance developer productivity and streamline the entire testing lifecycle, from test creation to debugging and analysis.
Playwright vs. The Giants: Why It Leads the Pack
While Cypress, Selenium, and Robot Framework have established themselves as prominent players in the test automation landscape, Playwright offers distinct advantages that position it as a superior choice for modern web application testing.
Playwright vs. Cypress: Beyond the Browser Sandbox
The fundamental architectural difference lies in how these frameworks interact with the browser. Playwright utilises the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to exert external control over browsers, offering a more realistic simulation of user interactions, whereas Cypress executes tests directly within the browser's execution loop via a custom Electron-based application. Playwright boasts broader and more comprehensive browser support, natively supporting Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (including Safari), a significant advantage over Cypress, which primarily focuses on Chromium-based browsers with more limited support for others. Furthermore, Playwright excels in handling cross-origin iframes seamlessly, a known limitation in Cypress. Playwright's support for multiple programming languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C#) also contrasts with Cypress's restriction to JavaScript and TypeScript. Finally, Playwright offers built-in and free parallel testing capabilities, a significant advantage over Cypress, which requires workarounds or a paid subscription for true parallelisation.
Playwright vs. Selenium: The Next Generation of Web Automation
Playwright demonstrates significantly faster test execution speeds compared to Selenium, primarily attributed to its more efficient WebSocket-based communication and out-of-process architecture, which minimises latency and overhead. Performance benchmarks often indicate Playwright's superior speed in end-to-end testing. Playwright's inherent reliability features, such as Auto-wait and Web-First Assertions, significantly reduce test flakiness and simplify test code by automatically handling element waiting and assertion retries, unlike Selenium, which often necessitates more manual implementation of wait conditions. Furthermore, Playwright offers a more modern and developer-friendly API, featuring concise and intuitive methods for interacting with web elements compared to Selenium's older and often more verbose API. The setup process for Playwright is also generally easier, with automatic downloading and management of browser binaries, eliminating the complexities of manual driver configuration often associated with Selenium.
Playwright vs. Robot Framework: Code-Driven Efficiency for Complex Testing
The fundamental difference lies in their approach to test automation. Playwright is a code-based library that utilises standard programming languages for writing test scripts, offering flexibility and powerful control flow, while Robot Framework is a keyword-driven framework that uses plain text files with predefined keywords to define test cases, emphasising readability for non-programmers. Playwright offers significant advantages for testing complex web applications that often require intricate logic, conditional statements, and more granular control over browser interactions, which can be challenging and less efficient to implement using Robot Framework's keyword-driven approach. While Robot Framework often relies on external libraries like Selenium for interacting with web browsers, potentially introducing performance overhead, Playwright offers direct browser interaction, leading to potentially faster and more stable tests. Playwright is generally considered faster. Furthermore, Playwright provides better integration with modern developer tools, IDEs, and CI/CD pipelines.
The Verdict: Embrace the Future of Testing with Playwright
Playwright emerges as a superior choice for modern end-to-end testing due to its comprehensive cross-browser support, versatile multi-language capabilities, inherent reliability through auto-waits and web-first assertions, blazing-fast performance driven by its modern architecture, and a powerful suite of built-in developer tools. It effectively addresses the evolving challenges of testing complex web applications, offering significant advantages over established tools like Cypress, Selenium, and Robot Framework.
Conclusion
I encourage software testers to explore Playwright further and consider adopting it for their end-to-end testing needs to experience its speed, reliability, and developer-friendly features firsthand. Playwright represents a transformative tool that is shaping the future of web automation and testing, empowering teams to deliver high-quality web applications with greater efficiency and confidence.