Playwright vs Behat comparison of testing frameworks
What are the differences between Playwright and Behat?

	Playwright https://playwright.dev	Behat https://docs.behat.org/en/latest/
Programming language	JavaScript	PHP
Category	End-to-End Testing	Functional/Acceptance Testing
General info	Test across all modern browsers. Use in your preferred language. Single API to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. Use the Playwright API in JavaScript & TypeScript, Python, .NET and, Java.	Behat is an open source Behavior-Driven Development framework for PHP. Behat uses the StoryBDD subtype of behaviour-driven development (the other subtype is SpecBDD); This means the tests we write with Behat look rather like stories than code. It is inspired by Ruby's Cucumber
xUnit Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.	Yes While using xUnit is supported, it does not support running parallel tests. https://playwright.dev/dotnet/docs/test-runners/#xunit-support	No
Client-side Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser	Yes Test on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. Playwright has full API coverage for all modern browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (with Chromium), Apple Safari (with WebKit) and Mozilla Firefox. Cross-platform WebKit testing. With Playwright, test how your app behaves in Apple Safari with WebKit builds for Windows, Linux and macOS. Test locally and on CI. Test for mobile. Use device emulation to test your responsive web apps in mobile web browsers. Headless and headed. Playwright supports headless (without browser UI) and headed (with browser UI) modes for all browsers and all platforms. Headed is great for debugging, and headless is faster and suited for CI/cloud executions.	Yes To enable Behat to test a website, you need to add Mink and a browser emulator (selenium maybe, though slow) to the mix. Mink methods are the connector between Behat and an extensive list of available drivers, and they provide a consistent testing API.
Server-side Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code	Yes While running tests inside browsers you may want to make calls to the HTTP API of your application. It may be helpful if you need to prepare server state before running a test or to check some postconditions on the server after performing some actions in the browser. All of that could be achieved via APIRequestContext methods.	Yes Behat can be used for Data Integrity Testing to verify that database operations are functioning properly
Fixtures Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test	Yes Playwright Test is based on the concept of the test fixtures. Test fixtures are used to establish environment for each test, giving the test everything it needs and nothing else. Test fixtures are isolated between tests, which gives Playwright Test following benefits: Playwright Test runs tests in parallel by default, making your test suite much faster; Playwright Test can efficiently retry the flaky failures, instead of re-running the whole suite; You can group tests based on their meaning, instead of their common setup. Learn more at https://playwright.dev/docs/test-fixtures	Yes One can use the 'Doctrinefixturesbundle' to create the required fixture loaders and load them in our Behat scenarios when required, using the 'BeforeScenario' hook.
Group fixtures Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data for a group of tests (group-fixtures). This ensures specific environment for a given group of tests.	Yes You can group tests based on their meaning, instead of their common setup.	Yes Behat allows for group fixtures
Generators Supports data generators for tests. Data generators generate input data for test. The test is then run for each input data produced in this way.	Yes Playwright comes with the ability to generate tests out of the box. Generate tests; Preserve authenticated state; Record using custom setup; Emulate devices; Emulate color scheme and viewport size; Emulate geolocation, language and timezone. Learn more at https://playwright.dev/docs/codegen/	By use of third party libraries like moodle-behat-generators
Licence Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software	Apache License 2.0	MIT License
Mocks Mocks are objects that simulate the behavior of real objects. Using mocks allows testing some part of the code in isolation (with other parts mocked when needed)	Yes Playwright introduces context-wide network interception to stub and mock network requests. You can mock API endpoints via handling the network quests in your Playwright script. Learn more at https://playwright.dev/docs/network/#handle-requests	By using third party libraries like Mock and Prophecy
Grouping Allows organizing tests in groups	Yes You can group tests to give them a logical name or to scope before/after hooks to the group.	Yes You can use tags to group features and scenarios together, independent of your file and directory structure
Other Other useful information about the testing framework	You can use the Playwright API in JavaScript & TypeScript, Python, .NET and, Java.