Playwright alternative for AI agents
The Playwright alternative built for production agents
Playwright is the better choice for end-to-end testing your own app and interactive browser flows you control. Zatanna is built for production access to third-party portals — reverse-engineering the network calls behind any portal and exposing one stable endpoint your agents call directly, with managed auth, anti-bot, and self-healing repair.
Keep Playwright for tests. Use Zatanna in production.
Playwright is built for your own app
End-to-end testing, deterministic flows, and network interception on pages you control — that's where Playwright shines, and Zatanna doesn't try to replace it there.
Third-party portals are a different problem
Pointing a headless browser at portals you don't own means cold starts, anti-bot challenges, residential proxies, and selectors that break on every redesign.
Zatanna talks to the system directly
We observe the workflow once, reconstruct the underlying HTTP requests — auth, sessions, sequencing — and host them as one clean endpoint. No browser, no selectors, no stealth upkeep.
Playwright vs. Zatanna
| Criterion | Playwright | Zatanna |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | End-to-end testing and interactive flows on your own app | Production API access to third-party portals you don't own |
| Execution speed | 2–5s cold start, then full page render per run | 200–500ms per workflow — direct request calls, no browser |
| Reliability | Breaks when a selector, layout, or button moves | Stable at the request layer, independent of the UI |
| Anti-bot detection | Default fingerprint flagged by Cloudflare / DataDome instantly | TLS-hardened, session-aware request sequencing |
| Infrastructure cost | 200–600MB RAM per Chromium instance, plus proxies | Under 10MB per workflow — no browser to run |
| Auth & MFA | Manual cookie/session handling and stealth patches | Managed auth, MFA, and session refresh underneath |
| Maintenance | Ongoing selector, timing, and anti-bot upkeep | Self-healing — change detection and auto-repair |
| Output | Raw DOM you parse yourself | Clean, structured API responses |
| Agent ergonomics | Scripted clicks and brittle DOM selectors | One stable endpoint your agent calls directly |
Bring one blocked workflow. We'll turn it into a production API.
Common questions
Playwright is the better tool for end-to-end testing your own application and deterministic browser flows you control. Zatanna is the better tool for production access to third-party portals — it reverse-engineers the underlying requests and serves one stable API endpoint, avoiding headless Chrome, anti-bot challenges, and the selector maintenance Playwright requires in production.
Playwright drives a real browser — rendering pages, running JavaScript, and clicking elements through selectors. Zatanna works one layer below the interface, reconstructing the network requests behind a portal and exposing them as a direct API. Playwright simulates a user; Zatanna calls the underlying system the portal already runs on.
For production workflows against third-party portals, yes. Anywhere you drive headless Playwright to log in, submit forms, or pull data, Zatanna reconstructs those requests into one endpoint. Playwright remains the right tool for testing your own application and interactive flows that genuinely need a full browser.
Playwright is free and open-source, but running it in production adds residential proxies, anti-bot upkeep, and 200–600MB of RAM per Chromium instance. Zatanna removes the browser entirely — under 10MB per workflow and no stealth maintenance — which typically lowers total cost at production scale.
Teams running end-to-end tests on their own application, automating interactive UI flows that require a real browser, intercepting network traffic during development, or doing low-volume one-off automation should use Playwright. It is the standard for browser testing and gives full programmatic control of Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit.