It looks like MCP & browser use tools have emerged as two ways for LLMs to interact with their environment and perform tasks. From my perspective, they seem to serve overlapping purposes in a lot of ways (some MCP servers even let you control a browser directly). I'm trying to figure out which will become the dominant connectivity point for LLMs.
My gut reaction is MCP. Browser use tools seem like they'll be bottlenecked by well labeled GUI data and also in a future where we're predominantly building software to interact with other LLMs, why bother with a UI + backend endpoints when you can just neatly define the endpoints for LLM consumption?
Curious other folks thoughts on this. Maybe there's more of a middle ground than I'm making it out to be. Thanks!
which of these mcp servers is best be able to connect my cursor to see the error and issues my card is dealing with? or another option?
Videos
Playwright MCP uses a session and prevents proper cache clearing. How many times did Claude tell me "Perfect Deployment!" only to open the console and see a row of errors? It's all about control and caching. Claude does just fine writing its own Playwright scripts. I can't see any use for the MCP at this point. Tell me if I'm wrong.
That. I've just had a meeting with the QA department in the company and the QA lead strongly encouraged (aka, is forcing) us to start using AI. The one they mentioned and one that drew my attention was Playwright MCP. They said it was wonderful and marvelous. I know they're doing this because their clients are asking the employees to start using it because it speeds processes up by a lot. I'm about to try it out but I don't know... I love creating test cases and automating them. I have a good time and that's the reason why Im into automation (half coding skills, half understanding the business). Not a fan of AI doing all my freaking job. I will still be doing automation test cases on my own in my repo. But have you tried it? What do you think of it?
PD: I've just tried. My opinion? Yeah it has potential as someone said here. I spent around an hour to get one single test running unsuccessfully. It's a tricky app, but quite close to a real scenario where things can get that way. I do see it can save a shit ton of time finding locators and setting the POM structure, not not much more. Actually, I showed it my code (which runs smoothly in every case) and it still couldn't get the test done correctly.
there isn't any guide to it, but I know that I can have the playwright browser running on one machine and the test script on another, and connect remotely to the browser (via BrowserType.launchServer and BrowserType.connect), yet I don't know how can I use the MCP server along with that.
should it replace BrowserType.launchServer? should it connect to the remote browser?
it all got me confused. I want to use LLM for testing but I still want to use the same browser for my existing playwright scripts.
If your Playwright/Puppeteer scripts work fine and never get blocked, this isn't for you.
But if you're tired of your automation breaking every time a site updates their anti-bot detection, keep reading.
The problem: Traditional browser automation gets flagged. You spend more time fixing broken scripts than actually automating things. Especially painful for sites without solid APIs like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Reddit.
What I switched to: CDP MCP (Chrome DevTools Protocol with Model Context Protocol)
Here's the magic: The AI runs the workflow once, learns the pattern, then it executes without the LLM - making it 100x cheaper and way more reliable.
What I'm automating now:
Go to twitter and post this {content}
Open Gmail and send this email: {content} to {recipient} with subject:{subject}
Open my web app and Test the login functionality with these credentials {username}, {password}
Go to this LinkedIn profile {profile link} and extract the professional experiences and details of this person (output in JSON)
Go to Reddit and post {content} in this community: {community}, adhering to Guidelines: {guidelines}
Go to Reddit and get all comments from this post: {link}
Go to Reddit and reply {response} to this comment {comment}
The killer feature: These workflows become API calls you can plug into n8n, Make, or your own pipelines.
Same outcome every time. No more "why did my automation break overnight?"
For the automation engineers here: How much of your time is spent debugging scripts that worked yesterday?
Because mine just got that time back. And my monthly LLM costs went from $200 to $2.
It's free and open source if you want to try it out.
Hey folks, I work on a app which goes through a journey from login, entering data on multiple screens & then submitting at the last screen. I was able to use Playwright MCP & make it go through the login & few of the starting screens but I plan to save & reuse the set of prompts repeatedly after every major feature goes through.
My question is whether to use MCP for such repeated validation or create a script using MCP or Playwright codegen which is more economical. Will the playwright test scripts give the same live preview that I was getting using the MCP tools?
I am learning more about MCP (Model Context Protocol) and I see there are many servers available now.
But I want to know from you all — which MCP server really made a big difference for you?
Like, which one is a game changer in your opinion?
You can also tell:
What you like about it?
Is it fast or has special features?
Good for local models or online?
Easy to set up?
I am just exploring, so your experience will help a lot. 🙏
Thank you in advance!
It seems that using Playwright or Puppeteer MCPs actually gives Claude Code “eyes” and “hands,” making it much easier to close the loop of coding → testing → validating → refactoring. However, the token consumption is massive, and after just one or two tests, the chat gets compacted. I tried delegating this to a subagent, but the results weren’t great. Do you have any tips for handling this? I’m also considering testing the browser-use MCP (https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use) - maybe I’ll give it a shot later today. Thanks!
I’ve been diving into Playwright’s feature set and noticed it has grown quite a lot beyond the usual cross-browser automation pitch. Some of the things that stand out are:
Automatic waiting and strong locator strategies (less flaky tests).
Network interception/mocking for simulating APIs and error states.
Built-in trace viewer, screenshots, and video recording for debugging.
Parallel execution and retries to balance speed vs stability.
Multi-language bindings (JS/TS, Python, Java, .NET).
Newer MCP style integrations where you can use natural-language/AI for certain flows.
At the same time, there are trade-offs: heavy CI resource usage, slower setup because of bundled browsers, and no true real-device mobile support.
Questions for the community:
Which Playwright features are actually part of your daily QA workflow right now?
Have you experimented with the newer AI/MCP-style integrations useful or still gimmicky?
How do you handle resource overhead in CI when running large test suites across 3 browsers?
Do you use retries, or avoid them to keep flaky tests visible?
For anyone curious, here’s the content that triggered these thoughts (good overview + pros/cons): Playwright New Features
Would love to hear how other QA teams are using Playwright in 2025.
Hey folks, I work on a app which goes through a journey from login, entering data on multiple screens & then submitting at the last screen. I was able to use Playwright MCP & make it go through the login & few of the starting screens but I plan to save & reuse the set of prompts repeatedly after every major feature goes through.
My question is whether to use MCP for such repeated validation or create a script using MCP or Playwright codegen which is more economical. Will the playwright test scripts give the same live preview that I was getting using the MCP tools?
What can browserbase MCP do , that playwright cant?
why should we pay for browsebase?
I was trying to automate some browser automation via Claude Code
Have tried Playwright MCP but always hit the issue that the token exceeded 25k for tool call.
The problem for such tool is that they will return the entire html, which almost will exceed the token limit as soon as the page contains a lot of data. Actually it is not a lot. For instance Reddit subreddit homepage - the single page will exceed limit.
To make it useful it needs to only return selected amount of information filtered or in expandable granularity. Like AI will first see only the root element. And AI can choose to expand certain tag to see more. In this way we can avoid the issue.
Is there any tool recommendation?
Just saw a YT video about using playwright mcp. All the behaviors described (screenshots, etc) are available to CC without installing or using MCP, so I’m just curious, is there value to using the MCP over simply asking Claude to “use playwright to visit blah and screenshot the results, review the error and fix”
As I'm sure many have heard, AI is all the rage.
At my company, there's been talks of using AI solutions to speed up the process of writing tests (currently it just me).
The topic of playwright mcp has come up a few times. Personally my concern is around cost of running LLMs and whether it really mimics a user's view/workflow since the default setting for mcp is using the accessiblity tree. Also the discomfort of using something that could replace some of my own responsibilities. But I admit I'm not very well educated in this area.
Has anyone used it? If so what are some pros and cons of doing so?
I’ve been messing around with the new Playwright MCP inside Claude Code and it’s honestly wild.
It doesn’t just simulate tests or spit out scripts — it actually opens a live Chromium browser that you can watch while it runs your flow.
I set it up to test my full onboarding process:
signup → verification → dashboard → first action.
Claude runs the flow step by step, clicks through everything, fills the forms, waits for network calls, takes screenshots if something breaks. You literally see the browser moving like an invisible QA engineer.
No config, no npm, no local setup. You just say what you want to test and it does it.
You can even ask it to export the script if you want to run the same test locally later, but honestly the built-in one is enough for quick checks.
Watching it run was kind of surreal — it caught two console errors and one broken redirect that I hadn’t noticed before.
This combo basically turns Claude Code into a test runner with eyes.
If you’re building web stuff, try enabling the Playwright MCP in Claude Code.
It’s the first time I’ve seen an AI actually use a browser in front of me and do proper end-to-end testing.
I'm trying to create a workflow that will enable Claude (or Cursor, I don't mind) to reliably perform what should be a simple task of making a tennis court booking for me.
So far I've tried Puppeteer, Firecrawl and Playwright, none of which appear capable to complete this action. They stumble over trivial things such as not finding the Log In button (Puppeteer).
Claude and Cursor both refuse to use Firecrawl even though it shows as running. Playwright gets as far as the court booking page and is then unable to click on an avialble slot to book.
Has anyone managed to get Firecrawl to work in Claude Desktop? If so, is there more to it than adding
"@mendableai/firecrawl-mcp-server": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "mcprouter"],
"env": {
"SERVER_KEY": "MY API KEY"
}
}
Thanks!
No matter what I try, Claude code cannot access the Microsoft Playwright MCP. I'm searching for troubleshooting tips, but can't find anything. Is there anyone using it?
[EDIT] Solved, "claude mcp add playwright -- npx "@playwright/mcp@latest" worked.