Playwright

Playwright drives real browsers from code: Chromium, Firefox and WebKit through one API, for end-to-end tests, scraping, screenshots and PDFs. It auto-waits for elements, runs test files in parallel by default, and ships its own test runner, codegen and a trace viewer that replays every step of a failed run. It's from Microsoft, built by the team that made Puppeteer at Google, and it's Apache 2.0.

Install with npm and it downloads browser builds, a few hundred MB by default; you can install a single browser or just the headless shell to keep CI lean. It now also ships a CLI and an MCP server aimed at AI coding agents. Version 1.63 in September 2026 added test locks so tests sharing a resource never run at the same time.

The framework is free and nothing is gated. Microsoft does sell hosted browsers: Playwright Workspaces in Azure App Testing runs tests on cloud browsers at $0.01 per Linux test minute and $0.02 for Windows. On GitHub Actions, public repos run free and private repos get 2,000 free minutes a month on the free plan. Compare Cypress Cloud at $75 a month ($67 billed annually) or BrowserStack Automate from $59 a month billed annually.

The catch: cross-browser means Safari's engine, not Safari itself, so a WebKit pass isn't a guarantee for real iPhones. And big suites need real parallel infrastructure, which is exactly what those paid services sell.