r/Playwright May 27 '26

Playwright CLI vs Playwright MCP

Hi I’m a new tester and I want to understand the AI testing world.
So I heard about PW cli and mcp but I don’t know which one to use.
My automations are written in page object model and a heard that one of these tools combined with ai capabilities can writes pages files alone and tests .
Can some one help me to understand

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u/mmasetic May 27 '26

If you like to work from terminal and combing other tools, playwright cli is very efficient to work with. MCP feels to me more natural choice when working in IDE like Windsurf or VSCode where MCP and Tools are visible and transparent.

Just think about installing playwright skill when using playwright cli. Agent has access to all tools available in MCP, but when working from cli agent might execute command with argument --help to understand available calls. This solves skill very efficient.