Puppeteer vs Virtuoso QA

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise quote-based licensing.

Everything, self-hosted

Free trial on request.

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Emerging

Virtuoso · since 2016

• 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.

• Natural-language tests remain readable by stakeholders while executing deterministically.
• Bundles visual, accessibility and API checks that would otherwise be three purchases.
• Strong story for migrating away from an unmaintainable Selenium suite.

• 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.

• Enterprise-only pricing and sales motion.
• Tests live in the vendor cloud, not your repository.
• Smaller ecosystem and community than the incumbents.

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

Enterprise QA functions replacing legacy Selenium without hiring more engineers.