Robot Framework vs Playwright

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. Microsoft also sells a hosted parallel-runner service; the library itself has no paid tier.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · since 2008

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• 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.

• Auto-waiting and web-first assertions remove most of the sleep() flake that plagues older tools.
• The trace viewer — DOM snapshots, network, console and screenshots per step — is the best failure triage in the category.
• True WebKit support, so Safari bugs are caught on Linux CI without a Mac.

• 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.

• No native mobile app support. Mobile means an emulated viewport, not a real device.
• The API surface is large; teams without a conventions document end up with four ways to write the same locator.
• Component testing is still experimental compared to the E2E runner.

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

Teams that write their own tests and want the lowest-flake open-source option available.