Playwright vs Puppeteer: The Differences

End-to-end testing for modern browsers with high-level API control has come a long way. Most things that a user can do manually can also be done with certain apps. Two tools, Playwright and Puppeteer, are often pitted against each when it comes to web automation. 

Let’s entangle the differences and similarities one by one to see how Playwright vs Puppeteer stack up in particular scenarios, including web scraping.

For your convenience, we also prepared a video on this topic.

Playwright is an open-source Node.js library developed by Microsoft for web testing and browser automation tasks. It enables developers to interact with web applications across multiple browsers, including Chrome, Chromium, WebKit (Safari’s browser engine), and Firefox. One of Playwright’s standout features is its cross-browser and cross-language support, making it a powerful tool for end-to-end testing, data extraction, and browser automation. It is available in multiple programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and .NET (C#).

Playwright is designed to handle dynamic web pages efficiently. It supports automatic waiting, which ensures that elements become actionable before interactions occur, reducing automation testing flakiness and the need for manual waits. It can also run in both headless and headfull modes, allowing for testing with or without a user interface. Additionally, Playwright provides features like capturing screenshots, generating PDFs (only in headless Chromium), and recording videos for test sessions. It also enables monitoring and intercepting network requests, which is useful for testing APIs, modifying request responses, and simulating different network conditions.

One of Playwright’s biggest advantages over Puppeteer is its built-in cross-browser testing capabilities, which allow developers to test applications in different environments, including mobile devices through device emulation. Playwright also supports testing on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also provides access to the latest browser features using patched versions, enabling multi-version testing. Another powerful feature is multi-context browsing, which allows for parallel testing of multiple new browser pages or iframes within the same session.

Although Playwright is relatively new (released in 2020) compared to Puppeteer, it has gained traction due to its rich feature set and reliability. However, it still has a smaller community and fewer resources compared to Puppeteer. Nonetheless, its ability to support browser extensions, proxy usage, multi programming language support, and seamless automation makes it an essential tool for modern web testing and automation.

 Playwright advantages

• Automates multiple browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, facilitating comprehensive testing across different environments. ​

• Compatible with various programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, and C#, offering flexibility to developers. ​

• Supports both headless (no UI) and headful (with UI) executions, accommodating different testing needs. ​

• Enables running multiple tests concurrently, significantly reducing overall test execution time. ​

• Incorporates auto-wait mechanisms that wait for elements to become actionable, enhancing test reliability. ​

• Offers capabilities like network interception, screenshot capture, and video recording of test sessions. ​

Playwright disadvantages

• The extensive feature set may present a steeper learning curve for new users. 

• Running multiple browser instances can be demanding on system resources, potentially impacting performance. ​
  Primarily supports emulators and lacks extensive support for real device testing. ​

• Some users find the documentation less intuitive, which can hinder the onboarding process. ​

• Compared to more established tools like Selenium, Playwright has a smaller community, which may affect the availability of plugins and extensions, as well as more limited community support.

What is Puppeteer framework?

Puppeteer is an open-source Node.js library developed by Google for automating web browsers, primarily Chrome and Chromium. It provides a user-friendly API based on the Chrome DevTools Protocol, enabling developers to control browsers programmatically for web scraping, end-to-end testing, and automation. Puppeteer allows running browsers in both headless and headfull modes, with headless browser mode being particularly useful for server environments where a graphical interface is unnecessary.

One of Puppeteer’s key strengths is its seamless integration with Chrome, as Puppeteer is maintained by the same team that develops the browser. This ensures great support and access to the latest Chrome features. Puppeteer supports capturing screenshots, generating PDFs, and using built-in selectors like XPath and text selectors to locate elements within a document. Additionally, it enables Chrome and Chromium extensions testing, though extensions cannot be tested in headless mode due to browser limitations.

While Puppeteer excels in Chrome automation, its cross-browser support is limited. It is officially compatible only with Chrome and Chromium, with experimental Firefox and Microsoft Edge support. In contrast, Playwright, a competing browser-driven framework developed by former Puppeteer engineers at Microsoft, offers full cross-browser compatibility. However, Puppeteer benefits from a larger community and more extensive resources due to its earlier release in 2017.

Puppeteer primarily supports JavaScript-based framework, though an unofficial Python port called Pyppeteer exists. Despite its browser limitations, Puppeteer remains a powerful tool for developers looking for efficient web automation within the Chrome ecosystem. Its deep integration with Chrome, ease of use, and strong support from Google make it a preferred choice for many automation and testing tasks.

Puppeteer advantages 

• Developed by Google, Puppeteer offers seamless integration with Chrome DevTools Protocol, providing deep control over Chrome’s features. ​

• Natively supports headless browsing, enabling efficient data extraction and automated testing without a graphical interface.

• Optimized for performance, allowing tasks to be completed quickly within Chrome environments. ​

• Benefits from extensive community support, providing a wealth of resources and plugins.

Puppeteer disadvantages

• Primarily supports Chrome and Chromium; support for other browsers like Firefox is experimental, limiting cross-browser testing capabilities. ​

• Designed for JavaScript, lacking official support for other programming languages, which may restrict its adoption in diverse development environments. ​

• Only supports the latest version of each browser, which can be limiting if testing on older versions is required. 

Puppeteer vs Playwright – which library to choose? 

The Chrome developers team created Puppeteer in 2017 to make up for Selenium's unreliability in browser automation. Soon after, the top two Puppeteer developers switched sides and moved from Google to Microsoft to work on a new solution – Playwright. The result – Playwright and Puppeteer are very similar in many regards, from API methods and web automation tasks to web scraping. 

However, choosing between Playwright vs Puppeteer depends entirely on your use case. Do you need cross-browser support for website automation or screenshot capture? Do you prioritize long-term stability? These are key factors to consider.

Playwright offers built-in support for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, shipping custom browser binaries and maintaining a set of patches to enhance automation. It also supports multi-language support, allowing developers to write tests in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET. Playwright's architecture enables performance testing, including network throttling, CPU load simulation, and request interception, making it a strong choice for web page performance analysis. However, its reliance on patched versions of Firefox and WebKit raises concerns about long-term stability.

Puppeteer, on the other hand, was originally built for Chromium but later introduced support for Firefox. Unlike Playwright, it does not rely on patches but instead works directly with browser vendors to improve the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). While this ensures better long-term compatibility, Puppeteer’s Firefox support remains weaker compared to Playwright. Despite this, Puppeteer is widely adopted in popular testing frameworks like Jest and Mocha for UI automation.

Playwright vs Puppeteer in web scraping

Web scraping is an automated process of extracting public data from websites. In terms of core functionality, both libraries have similar web scraping capabilities. Both can automate web page interactions, such as clicking on buttons, filling out forms, or scrolling through pages, and ultimately extract target data.

Even though both Playwright and Puppeteer use actual browsers, it's still possible to determine whether it's controlled by a real user or automated by an automation toolkit.

A frequent issue with web scraping is bot detection resulting in blocking from websites. It usually happens when the user (or an automated app) clicks several buttons rapidly and, as a result, sends an unreasonable amount of requests to the host server. Setting breaks between sequential activities is one of the solutions to avoid blocks.

Worth noting is Playwright’s auto-wait functionality. It imitates a (human) user by waiting a certain amount of time after filling out a login form and before clicking a button. In addition to this robust auto-waiting feature, explicit waits are also supported, such as waiting for an element to be visible in Playwright, and which explicitly waits for an element matching a selector to appear in the DOM. This flexibility ensures robust handling of elements in dynamic web pages. Puppeteer lacks convenience in this regard, as you would have set up timers manually using, for example, the Page.waitForSelector() method. However, multiple timers have the drawback of slowing down your browsing, and some websites can still detect them.

Naturally, both Playwright and Puppeteer standalone risk being blocked when web scraping. In turn, both can be integrated with a plethora of auxiliary tools. For interruption-free web data collection, third-party services, such as paid proxy servers or AI-based solutions, are required to bypass CAPTCHAs by using advanced browser fingerprinting. To use proxy services with Puppeteer, visit our integration guide for more information.

Proxies enhance Puppeteer and Playwright by preventing some of the anti-scraping measures. Residential Proxies, with ISP-assigned IPs, best mimic real users and reduce detection risks. Datacenter Proxies offer speed and affordability but are easier to flag. Whether for testing websites from different regions or handling high-volume automation, proxies improve reliability and performance of these automation libraries.

Playwright supports asynchronous clients for additional performance scaling and synchronous clients for simple script convenience, whereas Puppeteer only supports asynchronous clients. In Playwright, you can write small scrapers using a synchronous client and scale up simply by switching to a more complex asynchronous architecture.

One of the Playwright’s major advantages, cross-browser support, also shines in web scraping. If you're working on a project that requires scraping data from multiple pages, Playwright would have to be your choice.

Rather than specializing in web testing, Puppeteer describes itself as a general-purpose browser automation client - which is good news as web scraping issues receive official support (take a look at our Puppeteer web scraping tutorial). However, considering the sheer amount of supplementary features, Playwright has a slight edge in functionality when it comes to web scraping.

Comparing Playwright and Puppeteer

To put all of the information in this article in a concise way, these are the similarities and differences between these two libraries for automation: