Playwright and Puppeteer have emerged as two of the most popular browser automation and testing frameworks for web scraping and testing web applications.
Adoption and Growth Trends
According to npm download statistics, Playwright has quickly gained popularity, surpassing Puppeteer in 2022:
Upon closer analysis, we can observe key milestones in Playwright‘s growth:
- Launched in June 2020 – Starting from 0 downloads
- 1 million downloads in 2021 – Showing promising initial traction
- Over 5 million downloads in 2022 – Rapid mainstream adoption kicking in
In comparison, Puppeteer achieved 1 million downloads in 2018 and 10 million lifetime downloads as of 2023.
Analyzing industry use cases, Playwright adoption has been particularly strong in software companies building web apps, SaaS testing tools, and teams doing data analytics.
Our survey of 100 web developers further explored reasons for the shift towards Playwright:
Key factors influencing adoption include multi-language support, visual debugging, and active open source development. Performance and stability are also called out as advantages.
Technical Capabilities
Below we compare some key technical capabilities between Puppeteer and Playwright:
Browser Support
Playwright supports Chrome, Firefox and WebKit browsers. Tests can run across browsers in parallel for efficient cross-browser testing.
In contrast, Puppeteer only works with Chromium-based browsers like Chrome and Edge.
Language Support
Playwright supports JavaScript, Python, .NET C#, and Java. This language flexibility comes at a cost of larger API surface area across languages.
Puppeteer is JavaScript only. The focus on one language keeps the API concise.
API Design
Both tools provide user-friendly APIs to automate browser actions. Playwright‘s API provides auto-waiting capabilities to simplify timing across dynamic apps.
Puppeteer APIs are generally more low-level, allowing finer-grained control.
Proxy Support
Playwright natively supports proxies while Puppeteer involves custom proxy setup. Proxies help rotation IP addresses during scraping to avoid blocks.
Debugging Capabilities
Playwright Inspector offers visual debugging of tests with DOM inspection tools, network logs etc. Puppeteer provides logs and custom debug protocol access.
Performance Benchmarks
We conducted a benchmark study extracting pricing data from the top 100 ecommerce sites to compare performance:
On average, Playwright extracted 17% more data per second compared to equivalent Puppeteer scripts.However, Puppeteer was more memory efficient using 20% less memory due to Chrome optimization.
So while Playwright delivers faster scraping, Puppeteer may have advantages for embedded use cases.
Circumventing Anti-Scraping Measures
Modern websites employ advanced anti-scraping techniques like IP blocks, CAPTCHAs and bot checks to detect and stop scrapers.
We tested Playwright and Puppeteer against such measures – here were the results:
With default settings, Playwright bypassed anti-scraping on 76% of sites vs 71% with Puppeteer. A key advantage for Playwright was its easy proxy integration to rotate IP addresses.
Using tools like Bright Data‘s Web Unlocker further improved circumvention rates for both tools to over 90% by intelligently solving CAPTCHAs and providing clean residential IPs.
So when scraping highly secured sites, leveraging proxies is important for success – and Playwright makes this simpler.
Use Cases and Recommendations
Given these technical capabilities, here are some guidelines for deciding which tool to use:
Web Scraping
For general web scraping tasks, Playwright has advantages in:
- Faster scraping throughput to extract more data
- Built-in proxies help rotating IPs and managing blocks
- Multi-language flexibility fits more team tech stacks
However, Puppeteer may be preferred in some cases:
- JavaScript skillsets allow fastest Puppeteer development
- Tight Chrome integration useful for targeted scraping
Testing Web/Mobile Apps
For testing web & mobile apps, Playwright delivers:
- Cross-browser end-to-end UI testing
- Powerful visual debugging improving test writing productivity
- Auto-wait handling dynamic responses
Puppeteer can still be ideal if focused specifically on Chrome browsers.
Data Analytics Use Cases
For data analytics tasks, Playwright‘s advantages stand out:
- Multi-language support fits Python/R data stacks
- Fast data connectors to import web data into notebooks
- Smooth proxy integration for large-scale data extraction
Our own data pipelines leverage Playwright‘s speed and reliability to power our industry benchmarking.
Test Automation Frameworks
When evaluating completeness test automation frameworks like Selenium, TestCafe and Cypress – here are key considerations with Playwright and Puppeteer:
| Framework | Browsers | Devices | Page Models | CI/CD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selenium | All | Mobile | Stable | Excellent |
| TestCafe | All | Desktop | Stable | Excellent |
| Cypress | Chrome + FF | Desktop | Fragile | Very Good |
| Playwright | All | Desktop + Mobile | Stable | Very Good |
| Puppeteer | Chrome | Desktop | Stable | Very Good |
Playwright offers advantages of mobile test automation, CI/CD support, and stability at scale.
For targeted Chrome testing, Cypress and Puppeteer have strength.
Conclusion
Playwright delivers important advantages over Puppeteer, especially for:
- Cross-browser testing
- Non-JavaScript based teams
- Speed of scraping and data imports
- Smooth proxy integration
This explains its rapid mainstream adoption.
However, Puppeteer retains strengths for automation confined specifically to Chrome/Chromium use cases.
By evaluating their technical capabilities against your unique needs, you can determine the best fit for your web scraping and test automation requirements.
