A cross-browser testing tool, playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Users can test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed. It is also cross-language, so that the Playwright API can be used in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, .NET, Java. Test Mobile Web. Native mobile emulation of Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari. The same rendering engine works on the Desktop and in the Cloud. Playright…
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WebdriverIO
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
WebdriverIO, an OpenJS Foundation project, is a next-gen browser and mobile automation test framework for Node.js. It can be run on the WebDriver Protocol for true cross-browser testing as well as Chrome DevTools Protocol for Chromium based automation using Puppeteer.
Playwright is very well suited for any kind of frontend QA regression testing. It's perfect for ensuring that important features that are not often updated remain fully functional across updates or releases. It is not well suited for testing a feature that requires more developer updates before it is ready for end users. Playwright tests are not always simple to maintain if frequent updates are required to keep them relevant. Playwright can be used for API or database assertions as well, but it's not necessarily best suited for those scenarios. It does perform well enough to consider that use case for simplicity if Playwright is already relevant for any frontend QA regression tests that are needed.
Best suited where frontend developments are in React and where BDD and TDD test frameworks are to be used. Its syntax is very easy to write and understand. Even the non-programmer can do the initial setup. Not suited when the language you are using is other than Javascript(or Typescript).
wdio.conf can contain too much where everything is encapsulated there, like the before and after functions
A data provider-like testing would be useful. The only way to input different data into the same test is via a loop
everything is needed to be done using the 'browser' object. Can be limiting where you don't have access to the browser depending on where you are in the code
I find Playwright very intuitive and generally do not have any trouble using it on a daily basis. However, I do have coworkers with more limited experience in software who have struggled immensely in learning to use Playwright properly. Playwright is very well documented which helps if you plan to use AI to help you write any test automation (which I generally don't recommend, but is an option).
We selected Playwright over the rest for several reasons. The learning curve is faster, making it easier for our team to get up to speed quickly. The setup is pretty straithtforwared, minimal configurartion needed and a great example included in the configuration which includes all the basics to start writing using that spec as a placeholder. Compared to Cypress, Playwright support multiple browsers out of the box, giving us broader testing coverage. Appium is great for mobile testing, but extremely slow.
Other tools we selected don't work in our application, it does or doesn't support multiple frames or need more tweaking just to make it works. When testing out WebdriverIO it just works as expected, no need to do such walk around to make it works multiple frames. It also can handle multiple tabs and windows.