Nightwatch.js vs mabl

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

14-day free trial.

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

Established

mabl · since 2018

• Everything included: runner, assertions, page objects, reporting, parallelism.
• Very readable chained syntax that non-specialists pick up quickly.
• Tight BrowserStack integration if you already use that cloud.

• 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.

• Community is a fraction of Playwright's or Cypress's; fewer answers exist for edge cases.
• WebDriver-based, so it carries the usual latency and waiting caveats.
• Corporate stewardship by a device-cloud vendor is worth weighing if you plan to use a competitor.

• 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.

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.

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