# Playwright — MCP Server

> Give AI models real browser control — navigate, click, fill forms and screenshot any page.

**Source:** https://mcpplaygroundonline.com/mcp-servers/playwright  
**Transport:** stdio  
**Requires auth:** No

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## What it does

Playwright MCP wraps Microsoft's battle-tested browser automation library as MCP tools. When an AI model calls browser_navigate, a real Chromium tab opens and loads the URL. Subsequent calls can click any element by selector, type into inputs, submit forms, evaluate JavaScript, or capture a full-page screenshot. The server runs locally on your machine via npx — no account, no API key, no infrastructure. It is the go-to choice for agent-driven end-to-end testing, live web research, form filling and content extraction workflows.

## Tools exposed

- browser_navigate — load any URL in a controlled Chromium tab
- browser_click — click an element by CSS selector or coordinates
- browser_type / browser_fill — type into inputs or programmatically fill forms
- browser_screenshot — capture a full-page or viewport screenshot as an image
- browser_get_text — extract all visible text from the current page
- browser_evaluate — run arbitrary JavaScript in the page context

## Example queries you can run

- "Go to news.ycombinator.com and list the top 10 story titles with their point counts."
- "Navigate to our staging site, log in with these credentials and screenshot the dashboard."
- "Fill out the contact form at this URL and capture a screenshot of the confirmation page."
- "Scrape the pricing table from this URL and format it as a clean markdown table."

## Details

- **Recommended model:** anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5 — Claude Sonnet 4.5 handles multi-step browser workflows and visual reasoning best. Use Haiku for simple scraping; GPT-5.2 for tasks requiring vision on screenshots.
- **Transport:** stdio
- **Authentication:** Not required — No authentication required. Run locally via npx @playwright/mcp@latest — Chromium is bundled with Playwright. Node.js 18+ required.
- **Official source:** [microsoft/playwright-mcp on GitHub](https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp)

## Frequently asked questions

### What is the Playwright MCP server?

It is an open-source MCP server from Microsoft that gives AI models live control of a Chromium browser. Instead of reasoning about a screenshot you paste, the agent can navigate, click, type and extract data from any live website in real time.

### Does it need a real browser installed?

Playwright downloads and bundles its own Chromium build, so you do not need Chrome or any other browser pre-installed. Run npx @playwright/mcp@latest and Chromium is ready automatically.

### Is the Playwright MCP server free?

Yes. The server is MIT-licensed and completely free. You pay only for AI model usage — or use the free tier in MCP Agent Studio. There is no Playwright subscription or API key.

### Can I run it in the cloud or only locally?

The standard distribution runs locally (stdio transport). For cloud use, you would need to run the server process on a remote machine and expose it over HTTP/SSE, or use a hosted browser-automation platform that wraps Playwright.

### What is the difference between Playwright MCP and a web scraping API?

Scraping APIs return raw HTML or pre-extracted data for a fixed schema. Playwright MCP gives the AI agent full interactive browser control — it can log in, click through multi-step flows, react to what it sees, and decide the next action dynamically.

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_Test this server across 40+ models on MCP Playground: https://mcpplaygroundonline.com/mcp-servers/playwright — free, no install._