Puppeteer vs Leapwork

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise quote-based licensing, typically annual and sized by concurrent runners plus authoring seats.

Everything, self-hosted

Free trial.

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Emerging

Leapwork · since 2015

• 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.

• Genuinely usable by non-technical staff — the flowchart model is easier than any script-behind-a-recorder approach.
• Covers Citrix, virtual desktop and mainframe environments that most tools cannot touch.
• Doubles as an RPA platform, which can consolidate two budgets.

• 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.

• Flowcharts do not diff or merge, so version control is essentially unusable.
• Complex logic becomes an unreadable sprawl of blocks.
• Enterprise pricing with no small-team entry point.

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

Enterprises where business users must own automation and Citrix or mainframe is in scope.