Robot Playwright library

We as Playwright recommend using Playwright directly, since you then miss out a lot of tooling, which is not available from other tools which wrap Playwright. Like VSCode extension, UI Mode, Watch Mode, HTML reporter, our test-runner etc.

I am trying to persuade my company to use standalone Playwright instead of the Robot library and I'm collecting all possible pros towards this direction. Thank you for your quick response.

Robot is an extra abstraction, and would be useful for those that already know Robot. Our developers hated dealing with it, so going native was best for us. In our Playwright code we attempt to make things as readable as possible for our less tech saavy testers that are not developers by nature. One of the major drawbacks would be is translating codegen to a Robot solution, at times this would be more work. The additional abstraction might be valid, but we have found that it was easier training non developers to read code then having developers abstract their code more.

Hello and thanks a lot for your response. I also hate dealing with Robot and I want to push towards the standalone option. It is neat and clear. Apart from the great features like codegen and trace viewer that are missing from Robot is there a difference in execution time, configurability and stability between the two?

As For execution time I don't have any definitive test results, but Robot is not a huge impact but you might see a slight increase. The configuration would have slight changes and that could impact you trying to keep things up to date. On stability it would be assumed that the integration would not overly change, but again it would be something to consider. I don't want to down play Robot, but when you are looking for support for an issue, you will need to translate your question to a Playwright issue in most cases. The community will be smaller for those that are using Playwright with Robot. Not saying you will not find your answers, but you might find less collaboration or individuals that are facing similar issues. Going native the upside would be that you will not have that abstraction layer, and you should find direct support, also Playwright is constantly improving and sometimes breaking changes occur, and if and when they do the time to adjust your suite will possibly slightly longer with the extra abstraction. These last two issues of getting support and break fix time are not a huge concern but could increase your cost in maintaining the solution.