Puppeteer vs Nightwatch.js

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

PuppeteerNightwatch.js

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

Web

WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartup

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

Strengths

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.

Limitations

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.

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.

Best for

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

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.