Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Violentmonkey VS Playwright

Compare Violentmonkey VS Playwright and see what are their differences

Violentmonkey logo Violentmonkey

Violentmonkey is a userscript manager to support running userscripts in web pages.

Playwright logo Playwright

Playwright is automation software for Chromium, Firefox, Webkit using the Node.js library having a single API in place.
  • Violentmonkey Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-16
  • Playwright Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-22

Violentmonkey features and specs

  • Free and Open Source
    Violentmonkey is freely available to use and the source code is open for anyone to inspect, modify, and contribute to. This ensures transparency and community-driven development.
  • Active Development
    The project is actively maintained and updated, which means that bugs are fixed promptly and new features are regularly added.
  • Cross-Browser Support
    Violentmonkey is compatible with multiple browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Opera, providing flexibility to users regardless of their browser preference.
  • User Script Manager
    It allows users to manage and run custom scripts to enhance web pages, providing extensive customization options for a tailored browsing experience.
  • Easy Backup and Sync
    Features like backup and sync allow users to easily transfer their settings and scripts across different devices, ensuring a consistent experience.

Possible disadvantages of Violentmonkey

  • Learning Curve
    For new users, especially those not familiar with scripting, there might be a learning curve involved in understanding how to write and manage scripts effectively.
  • Security Risks
    As with any tool that runs third-party scripts, there is a potential risk for malicious scripts that can compromise user security and privacy if not properly vetted.
  • Dependency on Community Scripts
    The quality and functionality of Violentmonkey heavily rely on the availability and maintenance of user-submitted scripts, which can vary in quality.
  • Browser Performance Impact
    Running multiple or poorly optimized scripts can affect browser performance by increasing loading times and resource consumption.

Playwright features and specs

  • Cross-Browser Testing
    Playwright supports testing on Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, providing comprehensive coverage across different browsers, thus ensuring greater compatibility and a wider test reach.
  • Auto-Wait Mechanism
    Playwright automatically waits for elements to be actionable before performing interactions, reducing the need for explicit wait commands and helping to make tests more reliable and less flaky.
  • Headless Testing
    Playwright supports headless mode for all browsers, which allows for faster test execution and reduced resource consumption, making it ideal for continuous integration systems.
  • Context Isolation
    Playwright introduces the concept of browser contexts, which allows for isolated execution environments within a single browser instance. This enables parallel testing with reduced overhead.
  • Extensive API
    Playwright offers a wide range of APIs that cover user interactions, network interception, and browser automation, providing developers with powerful tools to create robust tests.
  • Network Interception
    Playwright can intercept and modify network requests and responses, allowing for advanced testing scenarios such as mocking APIs and simulating different network conditions.
  • Strong Documentation
    Playwright provides thorough and detailed documentation, making it easier for developers to learn and effectively utilize the framework.
  • Rich Debugging Features
    The framework includes features like verbose logging and debugging capabilities, which facilitate easier troubleshooting and quicker resolution of issues.
  • Support for Multiple Languages
    Playwright supports multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, and Java, offering flexibility to developers based on their preference.
  • Community and Support
    The Playwright project has an active community and regular updates, ensuring continuous improvement and access to support from both the community and the development team.

Possible disadvantages of Playwright

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    Due to its extensive capabilities and API, Playwright might have a steeper learning curve for beginners compared to some simpler testing tools.
  • Performance Overhead
    While Playwright aims to be efficient, its feature-rich nature can sometimes introduce performance overhead, particularly for complex test suites.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    The relatively rapid development and updates can occasionally lead to breaking changes, requiring teams to frequently update their test scripts.
  • Less Mature Ecosystem
    Compared to more established tools like Selenium, Playwright's ecosystem is still maturing, which may result in fewer third-party plugins and integrations.
  • Limited Browser Versions
    Playwright's focus on modern browsers and web standards might make it difficult to test older browser versions or niche browsers, potentially limiting test coverage for legacy systems.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple browser contexts and handling extensive network interception can be resource-intensive, requiring more powerful hardware or cloud resources for large test suites.

Analysis of Violentmonkey

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Violentmonkey is a reliable and efficient userscript manager that caters to the needs of users who want to customize their web browsing experience.

Why this product is good

  • Violentmonkey is considered a good choice for users looking to manage userscripts on their web browsers. It provides a clean and straightforward interface, supports a wide range of script sources, and is compatible with multiple browsers including Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Moreover, it is open-source, allowing for community contributions and transparency.

Recommended for

  • Tech-savvy users interested in enhancing their web browser functionality through userscripts.
  • Developers who want to test userscripts in a flexible environment.
  • Users looking for an open-source alternative to other popular script managers like Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey.

Analysis of Playwright

Overall verdict

  • Playwright is a strong choice for browser automation and end-to-end testing due to its reliability, cross-browser support, and extensive features designed to improve test effectiveness and developer productivity.

Why this product is good

  • Playwright is considered good because it provides end-to-end testing capabilities across multiple browsers (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit) with a single API. It supports multiple languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, and Java, making it versatile for different developer preferences. It offers headless and headed execution, robust automation capabilities, and improved speed and reliability over other testing frameworks. Additionally, Playwright's features like auto-wait, tracing, and capturing screenshots/videos of test runs make debugging easier.

Recommended for

  • Developers seeking cross-browser automated testing solutions
  • Teams working with multiple programming languages who require versatile testing tools
  • Projects requiring reliable, end-to-end testing capabilities
  • Organizations looking to integrate testing with CI/CD pipelines
  • Developers needing advanced debugging and tracing tools for tests

Violentmonkey videos

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Playwright videos

Generate tests in VS Code

More videos:

  • Review - Playwright Brittany K. Allen wins 2021 Georgia Engel Comedy Playwriting Prize

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Violentmonkey and Playwright)
Browser Extensions
100 100%
0% 0
Development
0 0%
100% 100
Dark Mode
100 100%
0% 0
Automated Testing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Violentmonkey and Playwright

Violentmonkey Reviews

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Playwright Reviews

Top Selenium Alternatives
Playwright offers a modern approach with auto-wait APIs and more native support for modern web features compared to Selenium's more manual and broad approach. While Selenium requires explicit waits and has a broader language support, Playwright focuses on simplifying cross-browser testing with its unified API and auto-wait features, which might reduce setup and test...
Source: bugbug.io
Top 5 Selenium Alternatives for Less Maintenance
Appium and Playwright closely resemble Selenium in terms of functionality but offer unique features and advantages. Both of these solutions require coding experience. Leapwork, a commercial vendor, uses Selenium under the hood to power their visual automation approach.
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Playwright, a Node.js library created by Microsoft, is considered one of the best JavaScript frameworks for testing. It automates Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API. Developers building JavaScript code can use these APIs to build new browser pages, go to URLs, and interact with page elements. Additionally, Playwright can automate Microsoft Edge since it is based...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Playwright should be more popular than Violentmonkey. It has been mentiond 327 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Violentmonkey mentions (46)

  • Show HN: UserScript to manually choose model for ChatGPT website
    - GPT 4o mini, so you can save your 4o calls for more complex queries https://github.com/altbdoor/userscripts/raw/master/force-gpt3.user.js. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • If your Firefox suddenly started to hang or become extremely slow today, check if you have tampermonkey 5.0. Disable it for now as it seems to be the culprit.
    Since Tampermonkey seems to be misbehaving, consider using Violentmonkey. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Current plan for the flag
    Step 1Install violentmonkey (or your favorite user script manager). Source: about 3 years ago
  • Andrej Karpathy โ€“ State of GPT ( At MSBuild 2023)
    Sounds like a good violent monkey [0] script for you do this weekend. :) [0] https://violentmonkey.github.io/. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • Auto expand for reports button in modqueue
    Toolbox is great, but if that is all you really need, here's this! You can copy and paste this as a new script to use in ViolentMonkey [AMO] or whatever script manager you use. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

Playwright mentions (327)

  • How to use Camoufox with Scrapy (New EASY Method)
    To see why this matters, it helps to remember what people are reaching for a different browser to do. Playwright is excellent at driving a browser, and scrapy-playwright wires that capability into Scrapy at the download handler so a rendered page arrives through the normal request and response cycle, asynchronously and quickly. The catch is the binary. The Chromium and Firefox builds that Playwright ships are the... - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • Vibium: A CLI Browser Automation Tool
    Browser automation has been dominated by tools like Selenium and Playwright. They're very powerful, but you need to understand the DOM, manage selectors, and set up a testing stack before doing anything meaningful. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Buzzword Bingo: An Experiment in Spec-Driven AI Development
    There is no live demo, but you can have a look at the screenshots taken by playwright during testing. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • How We Test an AI Product Without Burning Credit
    We ran straight into this while building a course product on top of The AI Platform. I want to walk you through how we ended up testing the whole chat flow end to end with Playwright. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
  • An Agent That Hunts Bugs in My App While I Sleep
    The app under test is The AI Platform by Zephyr Cloud, a desktop app where teams work alongside AI specialists in channels. The agent drives the real, signed-in desktop app with Playwright over CDP, the Chrome DevTools Protocol. Not a stripped-down test build, the same app a person uses. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Violentmonkey and Playwright, you can also consider the following products

Greasemonkey - Customize the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript.

puppeteer - Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium...

Tampermonkey - Greasemonkey compatible script manager.

Selenium - Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.

Greasy Fork - A site for user scripts.

Cypress.io - Slow, difficult and unreliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Install Cypress in seconds and take the pain out of front-end testing.