Cucumber vs Puppeteer

Free tier available

Free and open source

Open source core. SmartBear sells CucumberStudio for collaborative scenario authoring, priced per user on request.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

The Cucumber libraries are open source and free.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Smartbear · since 2008

Widely used

Google · since 2017

• Shared vocabulary between product, QA and engineering when the practice is actually followed.
• Scenarios double as living documentation that stays honest because it executes.
• Available in every major language.

• Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
• First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
• Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.

• Almost always adopted as a syntax rather than a collaboration practice, at which point it is pure overhead on top of your real tests.
• The step-definition layer is a second codebase to maintain and refactor.
• Gherkin obscures technical detail that developers need when a test fails.

• No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
• Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
• For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.

Teams genuinely practising BDD with three-amigos sessions, not teams who just want prettier test names.

Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.