PlayWright is a Web UI automation testing framework developed by Microsoft. It aims to provide a cross-platform, cross-language, cross-browser automation testing framework that also supports mobile browsers.
What are the best Web UI automation testing frameworks available today? The standout options include the decade-old Selenium, the recently popular Cypress, and the one we’re introducing here—PlayWright. How do they differ? Below is a summarized comparison for your reference
Although PlayWright supports multiple languages, it heavily relies on Node.js. Regardless of whether you use the Python or Java version, PlayWright requires a Node.js environment during initialization, downloading a Node.js driver. Hence, we’ll focus on JavaScript/TypeScript for this guide.
If you choose to download browsers, PlayWright will download Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, which may take some time. This process occurs only during the first setup unless the PlayWright version is updated.