Playwright vs Robot Framework

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · 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.

• Non-developers can read and often write the tests, which matters in QA-led organisations.
• Extends far beyond browsers: databases, SSH, serial, network equipment.
• Extremely stable and well-supported in regulated and telecom environments.

• 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.

• The keyword abstraction fights you once logic gets complex; you end up writing Python behind the keywords anyway.
• Verbose syntax and whitespace-sensitive files that are awkward to review in a diff.
• Feels dated next to modern JavaScript tooling, and hiring is harder.

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

QA-led and regulated organisations where readability by non-programmers is a requirement.