Jest Playwright vs Playwright Runner

So going forward, I do think Jest Playwright has its place and I am unlikely to change. The reason is, that as far as I understood Playwright Runner, it does not use Jest to launch tests. I deducted this from a comment from the developer of Jest Runner, which stated that it does not run in a vm jescontext. Which Jest does.

If Playwright Runner does not run with Jest as the actual test Runner, it looses a lot of its luster to me. This is because Jest has so many nice built-in functionalities that Playwright Runner could never keep up with. Which this project gets for free since it rides upon Jest. As an example, the various reporters, ways to run tests, to hook into via handleEvent, to run both unit and e2e tests with the same tool. I think the last point is my strongest; It means developers in a team only have to learn one CLI to run tests instead of two. Any project is bound to have a lot of complexity and the more it can be reduced, the better and the faster development.

Now, maybe I misunderstood Playwright Runner completely as I did not spend time reading the code or running it, and the docs are not updated yet properly. But I thought it’d be interesting to start a discussion about this here to see what the thoughts are from @mmarkelov and @mxschmitt who are the maintainers of this repo and its utils.

[mmarkelov]

@thernstig yeah! I agree with @mxschmitt that it’s very difficult to make comparison right now. playwright-runner may be a good solution, when it will be ready. For now I don’t have any plans about stopping maintain this library. We should wait until the playwright-runner will be ready. And then we could make decisions about future.

[mxschmitt]

I would not make a comparison until playwright-runner is not fully ready.

Differences in my mind (@mmarkelov please add more / feel free to edit):

• jest-playwright: has support for custom launch/context options
• playwright-runner: native support for TypeScript
• jest-playwright needs e.g. jest-ts
• both have support for multiple browsers
• both are based on the Jest runner API
• playwright-runner will get his page object via the callback parameters. jest-playwright uses globals for that.