WebdriverIO 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

OpenJS Foundation · since 2015

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• One API for web and native mobile, which is rare and genuinely useful if you ship both.
• Vendor-neutral: swap between local, grid and any device cloud by changing config.
• Mature plugin ecosystem for reporting, visual testing and accessibility.

• 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.

• Configuration-heavy compared to Playwright; the wdio.conf.js file becomes a project of its own.
• Inherits WebDriver's flakiness characteristics when used in WebDriver mode.
• Smaller community than Playwright or Cypress, so obscure problems take longer to solve.

• 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.

JavaScript teams that need one framework covering both web and native mobile.

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