Puppeteer vs Tricentis Tosca

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise licensing only, negotiated annually. Six-figure contracts are normal at scale.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Widely used

Tricentis · 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.

• Unmatched coverage of enterprise packaged software, especially SAP end-to-end processes.
• Model-based design means one change updates every affected test case.
• Risk-based prioritisation is a real answer to eight-hour regression packs.

• 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.

• Expensive, and priced for organisations with a procurement department.
• Steep learning curve; most customers buy consulting alongside the licence.
• Heavy and slow compared to modern code-first tools for plain web applications.

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

Large enterprises running SAP or similar packaged systems where no open-source tool reaches.