• Disclaimer= This investigation was into playwright cloud service not playwright itself

It is an cloud service provided by Microsoft that can do complete E2E tests through an azure devops service. It gives the ability to run tests in parallel for multiple different browsers (Chrome, Opera, Edge etc). As well as test against different operating systems like Windows vs Linux. Additionally, it also gives the ability to deploy from different services such as Jenkins etc. It promises to be a one stop shop for E2E testing while running from an azure server hosted by Microsoft.

• Multiple browser support
• Multiple operating system support
• Parallel testing across many different tests
• Runs in the cloud
• Microsoft product so it is well documented and reliable

• At one cent per test minute prices can get very high very fast. It is not realistic for Nextens to pay that much for a service we already have in Karate.
• New tool and system that everyone would need to learn
• Not as easy to learn as Karate
• Karate can do a lot of what it already does.

While an appealing option and tool, it simply does not match our needs at the price range it offers. While it looks like it would work really well and could be beneficial to us in the long term. The pricing makes it completely impossible for us to accept when we have a free solution already available to us that we already use.

However, Playwright itself could be an interesting tool to explore as a replacement for Karate UI. As using playwright outside of the cloud service is free. This makes playwright far more appealing than this cloud service option.