Why is Playwright the tool of choice for end-to-end tests?

There exists a rich ecosystem of tooling available for web-based end-to-end automated testing. Gutenberg uses Playwright as its end-to-end testing framework. The project previously used Puppeteer but has since fully migrated to Playwright. Here are the reasons Playwright was chosen:

• Multi-browser support. Playwright supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit out of the box, providing broader browser coverage compared to Puppeteer’s Chrome-only approach.
• Built-in test runner. @playwright/test provides a powerful test runner with parallel execution, fixtures, and auto-waiting, reducing flakiness and improving developer experience.
• Auto-waiting and web-first assertions. Playwright automatically waits for elements to be actionable before performing actions, reducing the need for manual waitFor* calls while still surfacing legitimate performance issues that affect users.
• Better debugging tools. Playwright offers a trace viewer, UI mode, and a built-in inspector for step-by-step debugging.
• Fixtures over global variables. Playwright’s fixture model injects page, browser, and other parameters into tests, making it easier to work with multiple pages or tabs and to run tests in parallel.
• Page Object Model. Playwright encourages the Page Object Model pattern for reusable utility functions, improving test readability and maintainability.

For more details on writing end-to-end tests, see the End-to-End Testing guide.