7.5Microsoft's Own Assessment

This used to be the part of the course where we argued the token math from first principles. As of 2026, we can simply cite the vendor: Microsoft recommends the Playwright CLI over Playwright MCP for coding agents, benchmarking a typical browser task at ~27,000 tokens via CLI versus ~114,000 via MCP — about 4x, with larger savings on long sessions. At the same time, Playwright MCP remains fully supported and is published to the official MCP Registry with every release, because sandboxed agents without a filesystem still need it.

This is not a third-party opinion — it's the team that builds the world's most popular browser MCP server steering coding agents to the CLI. When the vendor of the protocol integration tells you the skill path is cheaper, the debate is settled; what remains is knowing when each applies.