Is Playwright Free? What It Is and What It Costs

Yes. The license file in the repository is the Apache License, Version 2.0 (January 2004), with the lines "Portions Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation" and "Portions Copyright 2017 Google Inc." (LICENSE on GitHub). Apache 2.0 lets anyone use, copy, modify and redistribute the code, in personal and commercial projects, without paying. The npm package declares the same license in a machine-readable form; check it in one command:

npm view playwright license
# Apache-2.0

What Playwright costs:

You never need the Azure service to use Playwright: the same tests run on your laptop, your own servers or any CI. Microsoft sells it to finish a large suite faster on many hosted browsers.

What Apache 2.0 asks of you

• Using Playwright in your company, your CI or a product you run yourself: nothing to pay and nothing to file.
• Redistributing Playwright or a modified copy (for example inside a product or image you give to others), Section 4 asks you to:
  1. give recipients a copy of the license;
  2. mark the files you changed with a prominent notice;
  3. keep the copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices in the source;
  4. include the attribution notices of a NOTICE file, if the distribution has one.
• Patents (Section 3): the license grants a patent license, which ends for you if you sue claiming that Playwright infringes a patent.
• Trademarks (Section 6): the license does not let you use Microsoft's or Playwright's names as your own product names.
• No warranty (Sections 7 and 8): the code comes "as is", without warranty or liability.

Playwright is a browser automation library: your code tells a real browser to open pages, click, type, wait for elements and read content, the way a user would. Microsoft released version 1.0 on 6 May 2020 (release v1.0.0), and it is developed in the open at github.com/microsoft/playwright.

What makes it popular: it waits for elements automatically before acting on them, it isolates sessions in light browser contexts (each with its own cookies, storage and proxy), and it can watch, block or change network requests.

playwright.dev is the official website of Playwright: the documentation, API reference, guides and release notes, with a version of the docs for each language (playwright.dev/python, playwright.dev/java, playwright.dev/dotnet). It is maintained by the Playwright team at Microsoft, and it is where install commands and the current version are published.

• Testing. Playwright Test runs end-to-end tests in parallel across Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, with assertions that retry until a condition is met, screenshots and videos on failure, and a trace you can replay step by step.
• Automation. Filling forms, downloading files, logging in to your own accounts, generating screenshots and PDFs of pages.
• Web scraping. Loading pages that build their content with JavaScript, scrolling feeds, clicking "Load more", and reading the rendered data or the JSON the page fetches. The how-to is in web scraping with Playwright.

A minimal script in Python, all of it free to install and run:

# pip install playwright && playwright install chromium
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto("https://playwright.dev/")
    print(page.title())
    browser.close()

Playwright does not use the WebDriver protocol. Each library talks to a Playwright driver, which keeps one connection to the browser and speaks the browser's own protocol: the Chrome DevTools Protocol for Chromium, and protocols in Playwright's own builds of Firefox and WebKit. Because the browser reports events (a request sent, an element added), Playwright can wait for the page instead of polling, and can see and change network traffic. This is also why Playwright installs its own browser builds: each release is tested against specific browser versions.

No. Playwright is a separate project with its own architecture; it shares no code with Selenium and does not use WebDriver or browser drivers such as chromedriver. Both automate real browsers and both have Python, Java, .NET and JavaScript bindings, which is why they are compared so often.

When to use Playwright over Selenium: a new project in one of its four languages, pages that need reliable waiting, or a scraper that needs network control. When to keep Selenium: an existing suite or Grid, Ruby, or testing on the branded Safari through Apple's driver. More on Selenium in what Selenium is.

In Java, Playwright is one Maven artifact, com.microsoft.playwright:playwright, free from Maven Central like the other languages' packages. The latest release on 21 October 2026 was 1.64.0 (Maven Central metadata); check it or playwright.dev/java for the current release before you pin it.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.microsoft.playwright</groupId>
  <artifactId>playwright</artifactId>
  <version>1.64.0</version>
</dependency>

The first run downloads the browsers; on a CI server, run mvn exec:java -e -D exec.mainClass=com.microsoft.playwright.CLI -D exec.args="install" to install them ahead of time.

Advantages:

• Free under Apache 2.0, with no paid tier of the library.
• Auto-waiting and web-first assertions remove most flaky waits.
• Three browser engines and four languages from one API.
• Browser contexts make parallel, isolated sessions light on memory.
• Network interception, tracing and codegen are built in.

Limits:

• WebKit is Playwright's build of the engine, not the branded Safari app, and mobile devices are emulated, not real phones.
• The full test runner is for Node.js; Python uses the pytest plugin, Java and .NET use their own test frameworks.
• No official Ruby or PHP bindings.
• A browser per job is heavy compared with a plain HTTP request, so scrapers should use it only for pages that need JavaScript.