Software automation testing is a testing method to execute tests through automation testing tools. It consumes less time and human effort in comparison to Manual testing. The software automation testing enters test data into the system, compares actual and expected results, and produces detailed reports.

Automation software testing can be achieved by Automation testing tools or by writing test scripts. For repetitive testing or those tests that are hard to do manually, we use automation testing.

Automation testing tools help to automate data sets, defect logging, GUI interaction, etc. It’s used for both functional and non-functional testing. Here are the best automation tools, that help in automating the testing process and the best in the market.

Selenium
Cypress
Puppeteer
Playwright

1. Selenium: Selenium is an open-source automation testing tool that is widely used in the IT industry. It is mainly used for browser testing. It enables records of testing web applications and runs multiple scripts across different browsers. One can run test scripts in various languages; eg. PHP, Perl, Python, NodeJS, JAVA, C#, etc. on a single interface of Selenium. Selenium supports multiple Operating Systems like Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a very large community of testers so the updates are very frequent.

2. Cypress: Cypress is an open-source automation testing tool too, it also provided under MIT licenses. Anything that runs on the browser, Cypress does fast, reliable, and easy testing. Cypress takes screenshots when we run any tests and you can see that by just hovering over it and see what had happened in each step. It automatically reloads on every change. It doesn’t have quite a large community of testers but resources are pretty decent and communication is very effective.

3. Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node library. It provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the Devtools protocol. It can use for test automation in modern web applications. It takes screenshots of web pages, scrapes websites for data, and automates the interaction of web pages. That speed ups the tests we like to perform on the website, automatically.

4. Playwright: Playwright is an open-source JavaScript library used for end-to-end automation testing. It gets started instantly and automates with auto waits.

Here is a quick comparison between Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, and Playwright.

Cross-Browser
Selenium: Runs everywhere.
Cypress: Only Chrome/Firefox
Puppeteer: Only Chrome/Firefox
Playwright: Chrome/Safari/Firefox

Multiple Tabs + Frames
Selenium: Supported with bad switch API
Cypress: No real support
Puppeteer: Intuitive API
Playwright: Intuitive API

Test Creation Speed
Selenium: Yes
Cypress: Yes
Puppeteer: Yes
Playwright: Yes

Trusted Actions
Selenium: Yes
Cypress: No support (can use Puppeteer plugin)
Puppeteer: Yes
Playwright: Yes

Parallelism Grids and Infrastructure
Selenium: Yes (managed, costly) or build your own solution
Cypress: Either on their closed source paid cloud or you'll have to build your own.
Puppeteer: Usually people build their own (will change soon)
Playwright: Usually people build their own (will change soon)

Performance
Selenium: It’s fast enough
Cypress: It’s fast enough
Puppeteer: It’s fast enough
Playwright: It’s fast enough

Stability
Selenium: Complex Automatic WaitFor mechanism
Cypress: Complex mechanism that doesn’t work with frames
Puppeteer: WaitFor for certain things, but have to WaitFor manually for others
Playwright: Better WaitFor for certain things, but have to WaitFor manually for others

Smart(er) Locators
Selenium: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways
Cypress: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways
Puppeteer: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways
Playwright: Very promising start of supporting custom selector engines.

Debugging
Selenium: Debugging remote grids relies on the grid provider
Cypress: Debugging is not like writing simple JavaScript, it's chaining promises.
Puppeteer: Writing and debugging JavaScript from your IDE
Playwright: Writing and debugging JavaScript from your IDE

Documentation and Resources
Selenium: Very large community. Many testers.
Cypress: Not a big community, but effective communication
Puppeteer: A lot of tutorials and reading material but small community
Playwright: Cause of keep changing APIs, there are out of date documents and data.