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Building · For anyone building their own product with an AI. · a tool

Your AI tests your product before customers do

The open-source project playwright-mcp, by microsoft

“A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides browser automation capabilities using Playwright.” — the project's own words, on GitHub

What it does
This gives your AI a browser it can operate directly — Chrome, Firefox, or Safari's engine — so it can test whatever you're building the way a real visitor would, not just read the code. It sees the page as buttons, links and form fields rather than a picture, so it can click, type, and submit a form, then tell you exactly what happened and where it broke. Ask it to walk through your signup flow or confirm a fix actually works, and it does that in a real browser and reports back — with a screenshot — instead of you clicking through by hand after every change.
Replaces
manually clicking through your own app after every change to check it still works
For
Someone building their own product with an AI who wants it to actually operate the app — click, fill, submit — not just read the code that renders it.
Not for
Not for someone testing a site they don't control or trying to get past someone else's login wall — it's for testing your own thing, and it is not a security boundary against pages you don't trust.
Setup
15 min · Claude Code, Kimi, Gemini CLI or Codex · node (18 or newer)
You ask It works the list Green before it ships > add the sign-up > and the tests BEFORE IT SHIPS it never pushes on its own

Get it running

Paste this into the AI that runs on your computer. It does the install, checks it works, and tells you what to type first. If anything fails, paste the error back to it.

Paste into Claude Code
Install playwright-mcp (https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp) on this computer and get it working for me. I am not a developer; explain each step in one line as you go and never skip one. You are Claude Code, running on my machine.

1. Check what this machine already has (git, Python or Node as the project needs, Docker if the README says so). Tell me anything missing and install it, asking me before anything that needs my password.
2. Add `npx @playwright/mcp@latest` to the MCP config — there is nothing to clone and no separate install step.
3. Configure it. If it needs an API key or a login, stop and ask me for it; never guess one and never store it anywhere except where the README says.
   Tool-specific notes: Add `npx @playwright/mcp@latest` to the MCP config — no separate install step; Node 18 or newer must already be on this machine.
It opens a visible browser window by default; add `--headless` if the reader doesn't want that, or `--isolated` to keep the session out of a saved profile.
It reads the page's own structure (buttons, fields, links), not pixels, so a screenshot is for the reader, not how it works.
Confirm it's connected by having it navigate to a page and take a snapshot, and checking the result names real elements on that page.
4. Run the smallest test the README gives, and show me the output.
5. When it works, tell me what to type first, in one line, for this job: Walk your own signup flow.
If anything fails, show me the exact error and fix it before going on.

What to point it at first

1

Walk your own signup flow

Ask it to open your app and go through the actual signup form, field by field, and tell you exactly where it stalls or what error it hits.

2

Confirm a fix actually works

After a change, ask it to click through to the exact spot the bug was and check the fix — screenshot included — instead of doing it by hand.

3

Check a page across browsers

Ask it to open the same page in Chrome and then Firefox and flag anything that looks or behaves differently between the two.

What it must never do unattended

  • Never let it push to production or change a public interface on its own.
  • Never past a login or a CAPTCHA. Public pages only; respect robots.txt and the site's terms.

Who made it

microsoft/playwright-mcp on GitHub, under the Apache-2.0 licence. 36,908 stars, checked 9 September 2026. Last change 3 September 2026. We did not write it; we checked it, and wrote this page so you can use it.

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