Microsoft Playwright vs Tricentis Tosca

March 06, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
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Microsoft Playwright
Microsoft Playwright enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps.
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Tricentis Tosca
Intelligent test automation software. Tricentis Tosca optimizes and accelerates end-to-end testing of your entire digital landscape. Its codeless, AI-powered approach accelerates innovation across your enterprise by taking the bottlenecks out of testing and the risks out of software releases.

In a universe full of bewildering and occasionally frustrating testing tools, Microsoft Playwright and Tricentis Tosca have somehow found their place, performing similar cosmic tasks. Both are capable of automating web application testing with support for multiple browsers—because who wouldn’t want to check if their website works on Chrome, Firefox or WebKit? These tools also embrace the modern world of CI/CD pipelines, where tests can be executed cross-platform across Windows, macOS and Linux. All of this is wrapped in the heady promise of agile and DevOps environments, where rapid testing is just another day at the office.

Now, Playwright, being a creation of the good folks at Microsoft, is available for free and comes from the distant and relatively recent year of 2019. Developers of various languages (JavaScript, TypeScript and Python) might find it more akin to an old friend, as it primarily targets the testing of modern web applications with all their cutting-edge technologies. Unlike some tools that seem to prefer sitting in meetings, Playwright is entirely open-source, meaning you can poke around and change things at will, assuming you know where to look. It’s a developer’s playground, with a lot of focus on browser automation and progressive web apps, all with the confidence of Microsoft behind it.

Tricentis Tosca, on the other hand, is a commercial behemoth that arrived a decade earlier, in 2008, courtesy of the mysterious and occasionally mysterious Tricentis team based in Austria. With Tosca, testing involves not just browsers, but APIs, mobile apps and even enterprise systems, like some sort of Swiss Army knife of automation. It’s aimed at large enterprises where "testing" is a formal process involving business analysts and QA engineers, often leaving developers wondering what happened to the simpler days of just writing code. Tosca uses model-based automation, which means less code and more visual design, making it ideal for people who like structure and a bit of a framework to cling to in the vast, chaotic expanse of software testing.

See also: Top 10 QA (Testing) software
Author: Michael Stromann
Michael is an expert in IT Service Management, IT Security and software development. With his extensive experience as a software developer and active involvement in multiple ERP implementation projects, Michael brings a wealth of practical knowledge to his writings. Having previously worked at SAP, he has honed his expertise and gained a deep understanding of software development and implementation processes. Currently, as a freelance developer, Michael continues to contribute to the IT community by sharing his insights through guest articles published on several IT portals. You can contact Michael by email stromann@liventerprise.com