Few tools have seen such rapid growth in recent years as Playwright. The number of weekly downloads rose from 1.2 million in January 2022 to 52 million in May 2026—an increase of nearly 3,800%—and is now six times higher than Selenium’s and 24 times higher than Cypress’s. According to the 2025 TestGuild annual survey, 45.1% of QA professionals now use Playwright, with a retention rate of 94%: teams that switch rarely go back. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, and Walmart are among its users.

This growth is part of a broader market trend. The market for test automation tools is estimated at $41.67 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $169.33 billion by 2034. The specific segment of AI-driven test automation is growing even faster: from $8.6 billion (2025) to an expected $42.3 billion (2034).

At the same time, low-code/no-code is rapidly gaining ground: 64% of large organizations (5,000+ employees) are currently using at least one low-code platform, compared to 31% in 2022. This trend is directly fueling demand for testing tools that allow even non-developers—“citizen testers”—to build tests using record-and-playback or AI-generated scripts, such as Testim, mabl, Katalon, and Tricentis Tosca.

“Self-healing” tests—which automatically adapt when an application changes—are no longer experimental either: Gartner now treats AI-powered testing tools as a separate market category, with Keysight, OpenText, Tricentis, and UiPath leading the way.

M2Q advises organizations on selecting and implementing exactly this type of tooling, tailored to their existing testing environment—not to the hype of the moment.