Puppeteer vs Robot Framework

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · since 2008

• 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.

• Non-developers can read and often write the tests, which matters in QA-led organisations.
• Extends far beyond browsers: databases, SSH, serial, network equipment.
• Extremely stable and well-supported in regulated and telecom environments.

• 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.

• The keyword abstraction fights you once logic gets complex; you end up writing Python behind the keywords anyway.
• Verbose syntax and whitespace-sensitive files that are awkward to review in a diff.
• Feels dated next to modern JavaScript tooling, and hiring is harder.

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

QA-led and regulated organisations where readability by non-programmers is a requirement.