Puppeteer vs QA Wolf

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Annual service contracts. Substantially cheaper than hiring an in-house automation team, substantially more expensive than a tool licence.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Emerging

QA Wolf · since 2019

• 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.

• Removes the maintenance burden entirely — no flaky-test triage on your side.
• You own the Playwright code, so leaving is possible.
• Coverage arrives in weeks rather than quarters.

• 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.

• It is headcount, not software — the cost profile is completely different from a licence.
• External team needs deep product context to test meaningfully.
• Fast-moving products can outpace the feedback loop with an external author.

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

Funded startups that need coverage now and have no QA hire in the plan.