01 / POSITIONING
FIG. 1 · TWO ROADS
Code or no code: pick by the job, not the marketing
There are two honest answers to "which browser automation tool should I use", and they depend entirely
on what you are automating. We will tell you when we are the wrong one.
WRITE CODE
You are testing your own application
Regression suites, cross-browser matrices, assertions that must fail a build. That work wants
determinism: the same click, the same wait, the same expected value, every time, inside CI.
Playwright, Selenium, Cypress and Puppeteer are free, mature and correct for this. Use them.
WebRobot is not a QA test runner and we are not pretending otherwise.
SKIP THE CODE
You are moving data through someone else's site
Log in to a supplier portal, run a report, download the numbers. Collect every listing across
forty pages of a marketplace. Fill a quote form for 300 part numbers. Here the site is not yours,
it changes without warning, and a coded script becomes a maintenance subscription you never
agreed to. This is the job WebRobot is built for.
The failure pattern is predictable. A growth or ops team asks an engineer for a scraper. The engineer
writes 200 lines of Playwright. It works for six weeks. The target site renames a class, the selector
misses, the job returns zero rows, and nobody notices until a Monday report is blank. The script was
never the hard part. Owning it was.