QA Wolf vs Puppeteer

Quote on request

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

QA Wolf · since 2019

Widely used

Google · since 2017

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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