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Playwright vs TestCafe: what changed when TestCafe went native

Updated 1 September 2026 · Playwright 1.62 · TestCafe 3.7.6

A company that writes only Playwright is not a neutral referee and this page does not pretend to be one. It is for a lead with a .testcaferc.json and a folder of fixtures, deciding where the next two or three years of tests live. TestCafe 3.7.6 and Playwright 1.62.1 were both installed for it, on Node 20.19.6 under Windows 11, and every sample below was run before it was pasted in. TestCafe is not finished and nothing here says it is.

What is the difference between Playwright and TestCafe?

Neither of these is a library. Each ships a runner, an assertion mechanism, an element model and a way of describing a suite, and each is a Node.js program that opens a browser and runs specs against it. TestCafe's own documentation calls the architecture hybrid client-server and says where your test lives: "TestCafe tests are Node.js scripts. They can launch services and applications, read and write system files, make use of your favorite libraries." A Playwright spec is the same kind of file.

Every sample here runs on Playwright 1.62.1 or TestCafe 3.7.6, against the same small page: an Owner field, a Generate report button, and a status line the page adds half a second after the click. The same check, in each framework:

// tc/report.js — npx testcafe chrome:headless tc/report.js
import { Selector } from 'testcafe';

fixture `weekly report`
    .page `http://localhost:4700/`;

const owner = Selector('[data-test-id="owner"]');

test('the report fills in its owner', async t => {
    await t
        .click('[data-test-id="generate"]')
        .expect(owner.value).eql('Ada Lovelace');
});

TestCafe 3.7.6 · JavaScript, run against Chrome 152 on Windows 11

// pw/report.spec.ts — npx playwright test
import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('the report fills in its owner', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('http://localhost:4700/');
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Generate report' }).click();
  await expect(page.getByLabel('Owner')).toHaveValue('Ada Lovelace');
});

Playwright 1.62.1 · TypeScript, run against its own Chromium build

Both passed first time, and neither file shows the decision you are making. That sits in which browsers the run can point at, and in what the framework does to reach them — which for TestCafe changed in version 3.0.

Does TestCafe still use a proxy?

For Firefox, Safari, cloud browsers and browsers on remote devices, yes. For local Chrome and Edge, which is where most suites run, no.

TestCafe has never used WebDriver and does not now, which is the one part of the usual description that survives intact; the framework that made WebDriver the argument gets its own comparison. Everything after that has moved.

TestCafe 2.5.0 introduced automating Chromium-based browsers with CDP as an experiment, and the native automation FAQ states what happened next: "In TestCafe v3.0.0 and higher, native automation is the default setting." The Why TestCafe page says it as a property of the product: "TestCafe uses the native CDP protocol to automate local Chromium-based browsers."

The proxy is still there and still does the rest. From the same page: "A custom-made reverse proxy allows TestCafe to automate other browsers, including cloud browsers and browsers on remote devices," and under Page proxying, "If you disable native automation, TestCafe automates browsers with the testcafe-hammerhead proxy." The same page documents what the proxy does: it intercepts browser requests, injects automation scripts into the pages it returns, and changes all the URLs on the resource so that they point at the proxy.

A TestCafe 3 suite therefore carries two automation mechanisms, and the browser string picks one for the whole run. The FAQ says so with an example of a string that loses native automation, and its remedy is two commands:

testcafe chrome,edge my-fixture.js # Chromium-based browsers
testcafe firefox,safari my-fixture.js #Other browsers

TestCafe's own recommendation, printed as its native automation FAQ prints it, comments and all

Playwright has one mechanism. It ships and launches its own builds of Chromium, WebKit and Firefox and drives them over a connection it opens itself; the CDP surface its documentation exposes is the connectOverCDP attach method and CDPSession, both of them Chromium-only. That connection is taken apart on our architecture page, and nothing here re-derives it.

TestCafe's reason for its own change is on that FAQ, and it is the only speed statement on this page: a third-party solution such as its proxy "can only emulate browser events", while native protocols "control the browser directly" and are "usually faster and more stable". That is one vendor about its own two mechanisms. Nobody has measured Playwright against either of them on one workload, and we have not.

What does TestCafe's native automation not do?

TestCafe publishes the cost itself, under the heading Q: What are the limitations of native automation? on the FAQ linked above. Everything in the list below comes off that page, so you can check it there. The framing is TestCafe's too: the proxy was independent of the browser's internal logic, native automation is not, and the team asks users to be patient while it works through the gaps.

The entries a working suite runs into:

• "TestCafe cannot run tests in remote browsers, cloud browsers, and mobile browsers."
• Browsers launch with an empty user profile only, so the :userProfile suffix is out.
• Multiple browser windows are unmanaged, and the documented ways round it are disabling native automation, disabling multi-window support, or an experimental mode the docs say can hurt stability.
• NTLM authentication does not work.
• The page request timeout and the AJAX request timeout are ignored.
• HTTP requests cannot be routed through a proxy; for that the docs send you to the operating system.

Several more sit under the same heading, along with four bugs the team lists beside them.

Every item comes back if you turn native automation off. The switch is disableNativeAutomation in the configuration file, or --disable-native-automation on the command line, and the price of getting them back is that the run goes through hammerhead again. That is a switch with two positions, set per run, and a TestCafe team gets to choose. Playwright has no equivalent: one path to the browser, and every test takes it.

How do TestCafe's selectors and assertions compare with Playwright's?

Each project tells you what to select by, and the two say different things. TestCafe's element selectors guide carries a heading called Top Tip: Use Custom HTML Attributes, and the advice under it: "Keywords that reference custom HTML attributes are more reliable, because they don't reference mutable code." The example marks the target with a data-test-id.

Playwright's locators page leads with roles: "To make tests resilient, we recommend prioritizing user-facing attributes and explicit contracts such as page.getByRole()." Test ids are on the same recommended list, called "the most resilient way of testing" and marked as "not user facing". Both positions hold up: an attribute survives a redesign and says nothing about whether anyone can find the button, and a role locator breaks when the markup stops being a button, which is sometimes the bug. The samples here follow each project's own advice.

One collision to watch for if you read both documentation sets in the same week: TestCafe's Role is an authentication object, a saved login activated with t.useRole(), and it has nothing to do with an ARIA role.

The daily difference is in the assertion. TestCafe's built-in wait mechanisms guide: "The Smart Assertion Query Mechanism does not wait for page elements to appear. It just repeats the evaluation process until the assertion yields a successful result, or the assertion timeout expires." Its remedy is to say the two things separately — "add another assertion that checks whether the element exists, or how many elements of particular kind there are."

// tc/status.js — npx testcafe chrome:headless tc/status.js
import { Selector } from 'testcafe';

fixture `weekly report`
    .page `http://localhost:4700/`;

const status = Selector('[data-test-id="report-status"]');

test('the report says it is ready', async t => {
    await t
        .click('[data-test-id="generate"]')
        .expect(status.exists).ok()
        .expect(status.innerText).eql('Report ready');
});

TestCafe 3.7.6 · JavaScript, run against Chrome 152 on Windows 11

// pw/status.spec.ts — npx playwright test
import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('the report says it is ready', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('http://localhost:4700/');
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Generate report' }).click();
  await expect(page.getByRole('status')).toHaveText('Report ready');
});

Playwright 1.62.1 · TypeScript, run against its own Chromium build

TestCafe asks for "wait for it to be there" and "wait for it to be right" as two assertions. Playwright folds them into one, because toHaveText retries and the locator is resolved again on every attempt. Which of those a team would rather write is most of the day-to-day difference between the two frameworks.

Copying that guard everywhere has a consequence, and it shows as soon as the page is slower. The two waits run on different clocks: the Selector timeout defaults to 10000 ms and the Assertion timeout to 3000 ms, both published in TestCafe's command-line reference. status.exists returns false straight away when the element is missing, so the guard is bounded by the assertion timeout, while the property assertion under it resolves a Selector query and gets the longer one. We moved the status line out to four seconds and ran the files again. The guarded TestCafe test failed on AssertionError: expected false to be truthy; the same test with the guard deleted passed; Playwright's single assertion passed too, inside its 5000 ms expect timeout. TestCafe gives you two clocks and expects you to know which one a line is spending.

Where is TestCafe still the better tool?

It drives the browsers already on the machine. Its browser support table lists Chromium, Google Chrome, Chrome Canary, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari against their aliases, and testcafe --list-browsers prints the ones it finds installed. Playwright ships its own builds of three engines and drives those.

That includes Safari itself, and the limit is stated in Playwright's own documentation. Its browsers page: "Playwright doesn't work with the branded version of Safari since it relies on patches. Instead, you can test using the most recent WebKit build." A WebKit build is a rendering engine. If the bugs you are chasing are Safari bugs, TestCafe reaches a browser Playwright cannot.

It runs on a phone, too. From TestCafe's mobile guide: "You can run TestCafe tests on remote devices, including smartphones. TestCafe officially supports the mobile versions of Safari and Google Chrome." The device joins the same network, opens a URL the runner prints, and the test executes in that browser. That is a browser on real hardware, and it is not a native application: neither framework here drives one, and the tool that does is handled in the WebdriverIO comparison. Cloud grids come the same way, through browser provider plugins for Sauce Labs, BrowserStack and TestMu AI.

The qualifier belongs in the same breath, and TestCafe states it: "Disable native automation to launch tests in mobile browsers, cloud browsers, and remote browsers." The same page adds that you cannot take screenshots in remote browsers, or resize remote browser windows. A team that wants this reach is choosing it over native automation.

Is TestCafe still maintained?

It is not deprecated and not archived, and both take a minute to check yourself. registry.npmjs.org/testcafe/latest returns the manifest for 3.7.6 with no deprecated field on it; the full packument has no top-level deprecated key either, and the 26 individually deprecated versions inside it are all pre-3.x. api.github.com/repos/DevExpress/testcafe answers "archived": false. All three were re-checked for this page on 1 September 2026.

Releases are still landing. npm's time map and GitHub's release list agree that 3.7.6 was published on 7 July 2026, thirteen minutes apart. It followed 3.7.3 on 22 December 2025, 3.7.4 on 19 January 2026 and 3.7.5 on 16 June 2026, and the release notes on those four are dependency bumps, lock files, npm vulnerability fixes, CI workflow changes, a publishing migration and two small bug fixes.

The last minor release was 3.7.0, on 4 November 2024. Everything published since is a patch inside the 3.7.x line. Those are the two dates; the subtraction is yours.

The vendor's own account sits on the Why TestCafe page, which lists Actively maintained among the project's community bullets and describes a team quick to respond to GitHub issues and StackOverflow questions. The repository carries part of that: last pushed to on 20 August 2026, with 35 issues open on the day we looked.

Two places will mislead you. The documentation footer reads © 2012–2023 on every page and it is not a release date. And CHANGELOG.md on master stops at v3.7.2, dated 18 February 2025, while four later releases exist, so take the version from the registry.

Should you move a TestCafe suite to Playwright?

Read these against the suite you have.

• Move it if the suite runs on local Chromium anyway. Everything in the section above that Playwright cannot reach is something you are not using.
• Move it if every CI failure ends with somebody asking what the browser was showing at the time, and no artifact answers.
• Move it if the limitation list has already cost you a workaround nobody can explain to a new starter: a run split in two, native automation switched off for a reason that lives in a commit message, a multi-window flag somebody set once.
• Move it if what you are buying is a framework shipping features while you use it. That is a judgement about the release record above and it is yours.
• Stay if the value in the suite is the browsers Playwright cannot reach: Safari itself, a phone, a cloud grid. We cannot close that gap and will not pretend to.
• Stay if the suite is green, somebody understands it, and the case for moving amounts to Playwright being the popular answer. Popularity is not a defect report.

If the answer is yes, the fixtures, the Selectors and the .testcaferc.json are the next question rather than the tests, and converting all of it is what a migration engagement covers.

When this bites you

A team adds firefox to the browser list in CI to widen coverage. The FAQ says a browser string with an incompatible browser in it turns native automation off, and it means the whole run, so the Chrome half is going through the proxy too. Tests that were passing start behaving differently and nothing in the output announces that the automation mechanism changed.

From the inside it looks like an application bug. A coverage change lands, unrelated tests go amber, and the investigation goes to the app, because nobody is looking at the runner.

TestCafe documents the check, and it is one assertion:

// tc/mode.js — npx testcafe chrome:headless,edge:headless tc/mode.js
fixture `automation mode`
    .page `http://localhost:4700/`;

test('native automation is on', async t => {
    await t.expect(t.browser.nativeAutomation).ok();
});

TestCafe 3.7.6 · JavaScript. Passed on the Chromium-only browser string above; failed on both browsers of the run when a non-Chromium alias was added to it

The failure is sharper than the documentation implies. The alias we added opens Edge on this Windows 11 machine, so both browsers in that run were Chromium, and both reported false: the switch reads the browser string, not the browser that launches. The documented fix is the two-run split further up, and a team that splits its runs keeps native automation everywhere it can have it.

The second bite is a version problem wearing a framework problem's clothes. The same FAQ warns that a suite written against a 2.x proxy may have been "inadvertently adjusted" around the old event emulation, and that tests interacting with custom elements, or performing calculations related to element state, may fail on 3.x. Its worked example is SSL: the proxy ignored invalid certificates and a browser does not. A team on a 2.x-shaped suite should find that out before it reads anybody's migration pitch, this one included.

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