puppeteervsplaywright
Playwright supports Chromium + Firefox + WebKit. Puppeteer is Chrome-only. Playwright has better selectors, auto-waiting, and parallel test orchestration. Pick Playwright unless you have a specific Puppeteer dependency.
puppeteer
github.com/puppeteer/puppeteerChrome-only browser automation from Google. Slightly more raw than Playwright with fewer batteries included, but lighter weight and battle-tested on Chrome quirks. The choice when Playwright's multi-browser layer is unnecessary.
Full review →playwright
github.com/microsoft/playwrightEnd-to-end browser testing. ~65k stars. Beat Cypress on speed, parallelism, and multi-browser support. Default for E2E testing in 2026.
Full review →Which should you pick?
Pick puppeteer if…
You're Chrome-only and want a thinner abstraction than Playwright.
Skip puppeteer if…
You need Firefox or Safari support — Playwright handles those, Puppeteer does not.
Pick playwright if…
You are writing E2E tests for a web app.
Skip playwright if…
You only need unit tests — use Vitest.
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