Puppeteer vs Playwright

Both libraries control a real browser through code, and both are open source under Apache-2.0. The table compares the versions current in October 2026 (Puppeteer 25.16.0, Playwright 1.64.1, from the npm and PyPI registries).

Puppeteer started as a Chrome-only library and added stable Firefox support in v23.0.0, in August 2024. It drives Chrome through the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) by default and Firefox through WebDriver BiDi, the cross-browser W3C protocol (Puppeteer FAQ). Since v20.0.0 it downloads Chrome for Testing, a Chrome build made for automation.

Playwright covers three engines: Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, the engine behind Safari. It downloads its own browser builds that match each Playwright release, so a test that passes on one machine runs against the same browser versions everywhere. If your users are on Safari, or a client asks for tests on all three engines, Playwright is the only one of the two that covers WebKit.

For scraping, the browser choice rarely matters as much as for testing: most scrapers run Chromium. Firefox and WebKit help when a site behaves differently per browser or when you need to see a page the way Safari users see it.

Puppeteer is a Node.js library. A Python port called Pyppeteer exists, but its repository says it is unmaintained and points users to Playwright for Python (Pyppeteer on GitHub); more on that in what Puppeteer is.

Playwright has official, equally maintained packages for Node.js, Python, Java and .NET, with the same concepts and nearly the same method names in each. That makes it the practical choice for teams whose scrapers or tests are not written in JavaScript. For the Python side, see Python web scraping.

The two APIs look alike: you launch a browser, open a page, go to a URL, find elements and read or click them. The differences are in the defaults.

• Waiting. Playwright's locators wait until an element is attached, visible and stable before they click or type, so most scripts need no manual waits. Puppeteer has a locator API that waits too (page.locator()), but much existing Puppeteer code still uses waitForSelector() and timeouts.
• Isolation. Both create browser contexts, separate sessions with their own cookies and storage inside one browser. Playwright puts contexts at the center of its API and of Playwright Test; in Puppeteer you call browser.createBrowserContext() when you need one.
• Network control. Puppeteer intercepts requests with page.setRequestInterception(true) and a request handler; Playwright uses page.route() with URL patterns. Both let you block images, fonts and media to save traffic.
• Selectors. Both take CSS and XPath. Playwright adds role, text and test-id locators (getByRole, getByText), which survive layout changes better than long CSS paths.
• Tooling. Playwright includes a code generator, a trace viewer and a UI mode for debugging. Puppeteer relies on Chrome DevTools and the DevTools Recorder.

Neither is faster in general. On Chromium both send commands to the same browser engine, and the time a script takes is dominated by page loads, network latency and how long the script waits, not by the library. Published benchmarks differ by workload, so measure your own pages: run the same 100 URLs through both, with the same browser, the same blocking rules and the same proxy, and compare the wall time and the traffic.

What does make a difference:

• Waiting strategy. Fixed sleep calls waste seconds per page; waiting for a selector or for a network response does not.
• Reusing the browser. Launching a browser per URL costs far more than opening a new page or context in a running browser.
• Blocking heavy resources. Images, fonts and video can be most of a page's bytes; blocking them speeds up both libraries and cuts proxy traffic.
• Headless mode. Both run headless by default, which uses less CPU than a visible window.

For end-to-end testing, Playwright is the more complete package. Playwright Test bundles the runner, assertions that retry until they pass, parallel workers, retries, screenshots and videos on failure, and HTML reports. Puppeteer's own FAQ says a test runner is beyond its scope and points to community projects such as jest-puppeteer (Puppeteer FAQ). Teams that already run Jest around Puppeteer can keep it; new test suites usually start faster with Playwright Test.

Both make screenshots and PDFs with a few lines of code, so for a CLI or a service that renders pages to images, either works.

// Puppeteer: npm i puppeteer
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
await page.screenshot({ path: 'page.png', fullPage: true });
await page.pdf({ path: 'page.pdf', format: 'A4' });
await browser.close();

// Playwright: npm i playwright && npx playwright install chromium
import { chromium } from 'playwright';
const browser = await chromium.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
await page.screenshot({ path: 'page.png', fullPage: true });
await page.pdf({ path: 'page.pdf', format: 'A4' }); // PDF works in Chromium only
await browser.close();

Playwright adds element screenshots with masks and visual comparison in Playwright Test (toHaveScreenshot), which helps when you test that a page still looks the same. Puppeteer is a slightly smaller install when you only need Chrome.

For scraping, the two are close: both render JavaScript, click, scroll and read the DOM after scripts have run. Playwright's auto-waiting and Python support make it easier to start with; Puppeteer is fine for Node.js scrapers that only need Chrome. Do you need either? Only when the data appears after the page runs JavaScript. If the data is in the HTML the server sends, or in a JSON request you can see in the browser's network tab, a plain HTTP client is faster and uses less traffic; see HTML scraping.

Both take a proxy at launch. These snippets use the ProxyField gateway gate.proxyfield.io:7000; <login>-country-us-city-new_york asks for an exit IP in New York. Region, session and session time go in the same username: -region-<region>, -session-<id> and -ttl-<seconds> (30 to 129,600 seconds, 20 minutes by default), as in <login>-country-us-region-new_york-city-new_york-session-he9f2qga-ttl-600; every part after the login is optional.

// Puppeteer: the address in a launch flag, the login in page.authenticate()
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ args: ['--proxy-server=http://gate.proxyfield.io:7000'] });
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.authenticate({ username: '<login>-country-us-city-new_york', password: '<password>' });
await page.goto('https://api.ipify.org?format=json');

// Playwright: server, username and password in one proxy option
const browser = await chromium.launch({
  proxy: { server: 'http://gate.proxyfield.io:7000', username: '<login>-country-us-city-new_york', password: '<password>' },
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://api.ipify.org?format=json');

Full setups, with rotation, one proxy per context and error fixes: Puppeteer proxy setup and Playwright proxy setup. Step-by-step scraping tutorials: web scraping with Puppeteer and web scraping with Playwright.

Most Puppeteer scripts port in an afternoon, because the concepts map one to one. There is no automatic converter; you rewrite calls by hand.

• New project, any language other than JavaScript: Playwright.
• Tests across Chrome, Firefox and Safari's engine: Playwright with Playwright Test.
• Chrome-only automation in Node.js, small install: Puppeteer.
• An existing Puppeteer codebase that works: keep it; port only if you need WebKit, another language or Playwright Test.
• Scraping JavaScript-heavy pages: either; Playwright is easier to start with, Puppeteer is just as capable on Chrome.

Other options, from patched Chrome drivers to AI browser agents, are compared in Puppeteer, Selenium and Playwright alternatives, and Selenium remains common in QA teams that test across many languages.