TestCafe vs Puppeteer

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

TestCafePuppeteer

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

Web

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-market

Solo / side projectStartup

Adoption

Established

DevExpress · since 2016

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Strengths

Zero setup: no drivers, no browser downloads, works on any installed browser including mobile Safari on a real phone.
Automatic waiting and stable selectors with very little configuration.
Genuinely simple concurrency flag for parallel runs.

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.

Limitations

The proxy architecture occasionally breaks on apps with strict CSP, service workers or unusual auth flows.
Smaller community and slower ecosystem growth than Playwright or Cypress.
No component testing story.

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.

Best for

Small teams who want a working cross-browser suite with the least possible setup.

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

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.