Microsoft Playwright vs Tricentis Tosca
March 06, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
13★
Microsoft Playwright enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps.
13★
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.
See also:
Top 10 QA (Testing) software
Top 10 QA (Testing) software
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
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