mabl vs Playwright

Quote on request

Free and open source

Quote-based, typically sold as an annual contract sized by test runs and users. Expect mid five figures for a team deployment.

Free and open source. Microsoft also sells a hosted parallel-runner service; the library itself has no paid tier.

14-day free trial.

Everything, self-hosted

Established

mabl · since 2018

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• Self-healing genuinely reduces maintenance on UIs that change often.
• Auto-captured visual, performance and accessibility signals on every run without extra setup.
• Very little infrastructure to own — no grid, no runners.

• Auto-waiting and web-first assertions remove most of the sleep() flake that plagues older tools.
• The trace viewer — DOM snapshots, network, console and screenshots per step — is the best failure triage in the category.
• True WebKit support, so Safari bugs are caught on Linux CI without a Mac.

• Cloud-only. If your application is not reachable from mabl's infrastructure, the setup gets complicated.
• Complex conditional logic hits the ceiling of the low-code model.
• Opaque pricing and a substantial minimum commitment.

• No native mobile app support. Mobile means an emulated viewport, not a real device.
• The API surface is large; teams without a conventions document end up with four ways to write the same locator.
• Component testing is still experimental compared to the E2E runner.

Mid-market teams that want broad automated coverage without hiring an automation team.

Teams that write their own tests and want the lowest-flake open-source option available.