Browser Automation★★★★★5/5
PlaywrightMCP
Microsoft's Playwright MCP server lets AI assistants control browsers through structured accessibility data instead of screenshots. This means no vision model overhead — the LLM sees a structured tree of interactive elements and can click, type, scroll, and extract with precision.
At 27k+ stars, it's one of the most adopted MCP servers. Supports Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, and Edge. Runs headless for automation or headed for manual auth steps. The CLI mode provides token-efficient workflows for coding agents.
One-command Claude Code setup: claude mcp add playwright npx @playwright/mcp@latest
Pros
- + Official Microsoft project with 27k+ stars
- + No vision model needed — uses structured accessibility tree
- + Supports Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, and Edge
- + Headless and headed modes with persistent browser profiles
- + One-command Claude Code setup
Cons
- - Accessibility snapshots miss some visual-only elements (canvas, complex SVGs)
- - Requires Node.js 18+
- - Headed mode needed for manual OAuth flows
How We Use It
Two main use cases. First, smoke testing the nxsi.io site after deploys — Claude navigates the live site, checks that the nav renders correctly, verifies product pages load with pricing, confirms the analytics beacon fires on page load. It catches regressions that a static build check misses, like a broken client component or a hydration error that only shows in the browser.
Second, competitive research for the content pipeline. When the Ideas Scout workflow identifies a trending topic, Playwright grabs the full rendered page from competitor articles — not just the RSS excerpt. Some sites lazy-load content or render it client-side, so a simple HTTP fetch returns an empty shell. Playwright sees what a real browser sees.
browserautomationtestingweb-scrapingMicrosoft