Puppeteer vs Ranorex Studio

Free and open source

From €3,690 per year (indicative, per named-user Studio licence)

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

Perpetual and subscription options exist; runtime-only licences for CI agents are cheaper than authoring seats.

Everything, self-hosted

30-day trial.

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Established

Idera · since 2007

• 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.

• Best-in-class desktop application support, including legacy Windows technologies.
• Object repository keeps recorded tests maintainable at scale.
• Full C# escape hatch for anything the recorder cannot express.

• 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.

• Windows-only authoring environment.
• Expensive per seat relative to open-source web tooling.
• Web automation is competent but not competitive with Playwright.

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

Organisations automating Windows desktop applications.