Web scraping & data extraction · Microsoft
Playwright
Open-source browser-automation library (not a scraping product) that many teams use directly to script and scrape JS-heavy sites.
Playwright is a browser-automation library built primarily for end-to-end testing, not a scraping product — it has no proxy network, scheduler or extraction UI. It drives real Chromium, Firefox and WebKit browsers programmatically from Node.js, Python, Java or .NET, which makes it a common choice for scraping sites that require JavaScript execution, logins or complex interaction, since it renders pages exactly as a real browser would. Teams write their own crawl logic, concurrency handling, storage and (if needed) proxy integration around it; nothing about blocking or IP rotation is handled for you. It runs self-hosted, in CI, or inside a container, and several hosted scraping products (including some in this directory) use Playwright or a similar browser engine under the hood.
At a glance
| Vendor | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Open source + paid options |
| Free tier | Yes |
| Deployment | Self-hosted |
| Open source | Yes (Apache-2.0) |
| Best for | Engineers who need real-browser rendering for JS-heavy or interaction-gated pages and are building their own crawler. |
Pricing
Free and open source; no vendor pricing. Costs are the compute you run it on and any proxies you add.
Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.
Features
- Drives real Chromium, Firefox and WebKit engines
- Auto-waiting and network interception for JS-rendered content
- Multi-language APIs (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, .NET)
- Headless and headed execution, screenshots and video capture
- Built-in test runner with parallel execution (for testing use cases)
- Context isolation for running many independent sessions
- Codegen tool that records interactions into a script
Integrations
Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026