5.5The Test Runner: `@playwright/test`

Playwright ships with its own test runner that provides features other frameworks require plugins for:

Feature	Playwright Built-in	Selenium Equivalent
Parallel execution	Yes (workers)	External (Grid, pytest-xdist)
Test retries	retries: 2 in config	External plugin
Screenshots on failure	Automatic	Manual setup
Video recording	video: 'on-first-retry'	Third-party tool
Trace viewer	Built-in timeline debugger	No equivalent
HTML reporter	reporter: 'html'	Allure, ExtentReports

Basic Configuration

// playwright.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from '@playwright/test';

export default defineConfig({
  testDir: './tests',
  timeout: 30_000,
  retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
  workers: process.env.CI ? 4 : undefined,
  use: {
    baseURL: 'http://localhost:3000',
    screenshot: 'only-on-failure',
    trace: 'on-first-retry',
  },
  projects: [
    { name: 'chromium', use: { browserName: 'chromium' } },
    { name: 'firefox', use: { browserName: 'firefox' } },
    { name: 'webkit', use: { browserName: 'webkit' } },
  ],
});