Getting started with Playwright is exciting, between its broad browser support, robust automation features, and reliability. But sustaining that excitement over the long term requires effort. Playwright can quickly lose its luster once teams run up against challenges like the need to schedule tests, manage approvals and maintain audit trails – tasks that are critical for leveraging Playwright effectively in a business environment, but that Playwright itself doesn’t automate.
Whether teams derive value from Playwright over the long term depends on how they handle these challenges.In particular, it depends on whether teams have a plan for creating a governance and orchestration layer on top of Playwright or not. And if they don’t have this sort of plan, do they drift aimlessly without a strong approach to bridging the gap between Playwright’s technical capabilities as well as the business’s need for order and accountability?
Playwright is amazing, but it doesn’t do everything at scale
None of the above means that Playwright is at all deficient. On the contrary, it’s arguably the most powerful software testing framework available today. It takes all of the great ideas introduced by other frameworks (like cross-browser support, auto-waiting, and direct execution within browsers) and adds its own.
But there are many other things that Playwright doesn’t do, like orchestrate tests, manage permissions or generate audit reports. You can’t blame Playwright, either, because these capabilities fall outside the realm of test automation. They aren’t Playwright’s job.
They are, however, obligations that are critical for enterprises that want to use Playwright at scale. For instance, if you want to run hundreds of tests efficiently, you need a way to schedule tests across nodes, and Playwright won’t do that for you. Likewise, if you need to test across multiple user accounts, you need to make sure all of those accounts can authenticate, which is another challenge Playwright won’t solve for you.
To be sure, Playwright on its own is just fine if you have only a handful of tests to run or you are testing in just one environment. Under those conditions, teams can manage tests manually. But everyone working at enterprise scale needs more than what Playwright offers on its own.
Building on top of Playwright
One way to address this challenge is to build out custom tooling, like scripts that can orchestrate tests or manage permissions. The downside is that this takes a lot of time and effort. And the more time engineers spend building and maintaining custom tooling, the slower and more manual their testing routine is, which means they’re less able to capitalize on the speed and efficiency that frameworks like Playwright are supposed to bring to QA.
A better approach is to leverage a turnkey platform that enriches Playwright with the capabilities necessary to test efficiently and effectively at any scale.
We built the Leapwork Continuous Validation Platform to do just that: empower software and QA professionals with a ready-to-use platform that fills in the gaps surrounding Playwright. Our goal is to allow teams to focus on validating software and creating value for their organizations, not coding custom orchestration or governance tooling that will become a nightmare to maintain.
As part of the Continuous Validation Platform, Leapwork Play uses AI to build and understand tests, then runs them deterministically, with no LLM calls at execution time. It then allows users to execute at scale, running the suite across enterprise infrastructure without a team having to build its own orchestration layer. Users can also self-heal tests automatically when an element changes, allowing QA to repair a native-playwright test without requiring an engineer to intervene.
At Leapwork, we want software and QA professionals to love Playwright for what it is (an incredibly powerful and modern test automation solution) not resent it for what it’s not and doesn’t want to be (an enterprise-scale test management platform).
