Playwright is a library for controlling web browsers similar to Cypress, Nightwatch, Selenium etc etc. Its modern, advanced and fast! Especially compared to Selenium and Selenium Grid from providers such as BrowserStack and SauceLabs.

Playwright supports videos, console and network logs out of the box. Even for headless browsers.

You can work with downloads, browser’s network-stack and console.

It has convenient ways of locating elements and easily combines different locator types into 1 locator. Selenium has ByChained, but is more cumbersome.

It automatically waits for elements to be actionable, while Selenium requires the tester to use constructs like: Wait.Until(ElementIsClickable()).Click()

Playwright does way less DOM access than Selenium. Here’s an somewhat extreme example to show the difference. If you do this in Selenium, then for each row, it will query the DOM to return a WebElement for the checkbox in the row.

var rows = FindElements(By.ClassName("table-row"))
foreach(var row in rows)
{
   var checkbox = row.FindElement(By.ClassName("checkbox"))
}

Playwright won’t query the DOM for the checkbox. It returns a new locator (equivalent to Selenium’s By class) derived from the row web element to find that specific check-box.

Runs headless in CI/CD pipelines but still delivers video recordings and logfiles.

Although most tutorials use the default Playwright test runner, its works great with TypeScript and cucumber-js.