Puppeteer 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.

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Established

mabl · since 2018

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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