Illustration of what playwright does: One API to test and automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, for scripts and agents

microsoft /

playwright

One API to test and automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, for scripts and agents

Open on GitHub (opens in a new tab) Website (opens in a new tab)

Playwright controls real web browsers from code. You write steps like open a page, click a link, check a heading, and Playwright runs them in Chromium, Firefox or WebKit with the same API. It works on Linux, macOS and Windows, headless or with a visible window.

It comes in several forms. Playwright Test is a test runner with auto-waiting, retrying assertions and a fresh browser context for every test. The library is for plain scripts such as screenshots, PDFs and scraping. A CLI and an MCP server let coding agents and LLM clients drive a browser.

For agents, the README says the CLI is more token-efficient than MCP because it avoids loading large tool schemas and accessibility trees into the model context. The MCP server instead gives agents a structured accessibility snapshot of the page, so no vision model or screenshots are needed. Playwright is also available for Python, .NET and Java.

What it does

  • Cross-browser, one API

    Runs Chromium, Firefox and WebKit on Linux, macOS and Windows, headless or headed.

  • Auto-wait and web-first assertions

    Playwright waits for elements to be actionable, and assertions retry until they pass, so tests need no artificial timeouts.

  • Isolated tests and Trace Viewer

    Each test gets a fresh browser context, and you can save login state to reuse. Traces capture actions, DOM snapshots, network requests and console messages for debugging.

  • CLI and MCP server for agents

    The CLI targets coding agents like Claude Code and Copilot. The MCP server lets clients such as VS Code, Cursor and Claude Desktop use a browser through accessibility snapshots.

  • VS Code extension

    Run and debug tests from the editor, record tests with CodeGen, and pick locators by hovering over elements.

What you could build

  • Write end-to-end tests for a web app and run them in parallel across three browsers.
  • Capture screenshots or generate PDFs of web pages with a short script.
  • Emulate a mobile device such as an iPhone 15 to check how a page looks.
  • Let a coding agent test a web flow and take screenshots using the CLI.
  • Connect an MCP client so an AI assistant can fill forms and navigate sites.

Get started

For testing, run the init command to set up a project with example tests, then run them. For AI agents, add the MCP server to your client's config or install the CLI as the README describes.

npm init playwright@latest
npx playwright test
npx @playwright/mcp@latest

Commands are copied from the project's README. Read it on GitHub for the full setup.

More in Browser & computer use

See all
browser-use Python library and CLI that lets an LLM drive a web browser to finish tasks 118.9k1.9k Agent-Reach Setup layer that lets AI agents read the web, YouTube, GitHub, Reddit and more 101.1k13.5k Scrapling Python web scraping framework, from one request to large crawls 89.2k4.2k crawl4ai Python crawler that turns web pages into clean Markdown or JSON for LLMs 86.1k1.4k agent-browser A command-line tool that lets AI agents drive a Chrome browser 44.4k994 UI-TARS-desktop Open-source agent stack that drives browsers and desktops with vision models and MCP 39.4k187 playwright-mcp Browser automation server that lets AI assistants drive web pages through Playwright 38.5k766 CloakBrowser Patched Chromium that works as a drop-in Playwright replacement for bot-protected sites 32.4k566 page-agent JavaScript library that lets people control a web page with plain-language commands 29.6k242 ego-lite A macOS browser where AI agents work in their own Spaces while you keep browsing 18.8k2.1k

    ↑↓ to move, Enter to open, Esc to close