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Playwright vs Puppeteer

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berstend̡̲̫̹̠̖͚͓̔̄̓̐̄͛̀͘ edited this page Nov 28, 2020 · 22 revisions

Playwright vs. Puppeteer

Gist

  • Playwright and Puppeteer are modern browser automation libraries to control real browsers with code
  • Both are Node.js based and use the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) behind the scenes
  • They share the same roots and their APIs (e.g. page.goto()) are often the same or very similar

TL;DR - Which one should I use?

Switching them out later is relatively easy as their APIs are so similar, choose based on your current needs.

  • Choose Playwright
    • if you need to use browsers other than Chrome/Chromium right now
  • Choose Puppeteer
    • if you rely on being able to use plugins like stealth right now

A little bit of history

Puppeteer & Playwright

  • Puppeteer started as official Google project in 2017 and quickly gained popularity
    • It's considered to be the first modern browser automation tool, after projects like Selenium and PhantomJS
  • Playwright started in 2020 after Microsoft bought hired a few of the core Puppeteer maintainers
    • They started fresh with prior experience: TypeScript and multi-browser support from the get go
  • Both are actively maintained and push regular updates

puppeteer-extra, playwright-extra, automation-extra

  • We started the project in 2018 with puppeteer-extra, a modular plugin framework for Puppeteer
    • We introduced popular plugins like stealth and recaptcha
    • Plugins are based off puppeteer-extra-plugin
  • We rewrote the plugin framework in 2020 to support Playwright as well
    • A new automation-extra package acts as a shared foundation for all drivers
    • playwright-extra & puppeteer-extra are slim entry points for automation-extra
    • New plugins will be based off automation-extra-plugin, which supports Playwright & Puppeteer events

Plugin support

  • Playwright support in the plugin framework doesn't mean all existing plugins can be used with Playwright immediately
    • The existing puppeteer-extra plugins need to be ported to automation-extra-plugin and optimized to be used with Firefox and Webkit as well
  • New plugins work with both playwright-extra as well as puppeteer-extra and usually all browsers
  • You can recognize new plugins by their package name: @extra/foobar as opposed to puppeteer-extra-plugin-foobar

Differences

Browser support

  • Playwright has first class support for Chromium, Firefox and Webkit browsers
    • They accomplish this by maintaining a set of browser patches and shipping custom binaries
    • They introduced a unified wire protocol which internally translates to CDP, Juggler, WDP
  • Puppeteer has been heavily Chromium focussed and only recently added Firefox support to their core
    • Instead of maintaining patches they work with the browser vendors to improve their CDP functionality
    • Their Firefox support is currently no match for Playwright, even basic features are missing

Conceptual differences

  • The biggest difference between the two (in API usage) is Playwright heavily using the concept of "browser contexts"

Further reading

Discord

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