Comment by jberthom
7 days ago
Maker here. Playwright is great, I use it too. The difference is really about who’s driving. ProofShot is meant for agents that just need shell commands, start to open the browser and begin recording, exec to interact with the page, stop to bundle everything up. You get video, screenshots, console errors, server logs, and an interactive HTML viewer in one artifacts folder you can drop on a PR with proofshot pr. With Playwright the agent needs to write a test script, run it, collect screenshots, parse output separately… it’s a lot of glue code. Also agent-browser’s element references are ~93% smaller than Playwright’s accessibility tree, which adds up when you’re paying per token.
> With Playwright the agent needs to write a test script, run it, collect screenshots, parse output separately… it’s a lot of glue code.
It most certainly does not require any glue code. Playwright cli gives you basically all of this out of the box.
https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli?tab=readme-ov-fi...
ProofShot isn’t a Playwright alternative, it’s built on agent-browser (from Vercel Labs), which is a different runtime. The value isn’t “can control a browser” — playwright does that fine, and in fact agent-browser is built on top of Playwright, hence so is ProofShot :) The value is bundling video + screenshots + console errors + server logs + action timeline into a single viewer.html and uploading it to the PR. That’s what saves me review time. If your workflow doesn’t need that bundle, playwright-cli works great.