Playwright vs Cucumber

Free and open source

Free tier available

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

The Cucumber libraries are open source and free.

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Widely used

Smartbear · since 2008

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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