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.

The basics

Playwright and Puppeteer are both Node.js libraries used to control headless browsers for web testing and browser automation. The two solutions are much more alike than they’re different, although there are some crucial distinctions.

Playwright, developed by Microsoft, has cross-language and cross-browser support with both asynchronous and synchronous client implementations.

Puppeteer, developed by Google, has a strong implementation of Chrome DevTools Protocol that provides a user-friendly API to drive Chromium-based environments.

The competitive background

Looking back, 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 – the two are very similar in many regards, from API methods and automation to web scraping.

Naturally, Playwright is much newer – released in January 2020. As evident from the graph above, Puppeteer is a more popular option as of January 2023.

Playwright and 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.

For your convenience, we also prepared a video tutorial on Playwright and Puppeteer in web scraping.

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-waiting function. It imitates a (human) user by waiting a certain amount of time after filling out a login form and before clicking a button. 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 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 proxies with Puppeteer, visit our integration guide for more information.

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 browsers, 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.

The differences

Take a look at the main differences between the two tools in the table below. Language, browser, and community support, along with documentation, are the major diverging features.