webdriverio

WebdriverIO

Next-gen browser and mobile automation test framework for Node.js

This package provides an easy-to-manage API and a lot of syntactical sugar on top of the WebDriver specification. You can use WebdriverIO as a standalone package or via a test runner using @wdio/cli. WebdriverIO allows you to run tests locally using the WebDriver as well as remote user agents using cloud providers like Sauce Labs.

Installation

You can install WebdriverIO via NPM:

npm install webdriverio

Usage

WebdriverIO by default uses Puppeteer to automate a browser like Chrome, Firefox or Chromium Edge. So if you have Chrome installed, the following script should start a browser for you and get the title of the page:

import { remote } from 'webdriverio'

const browser = await remote({
    capabilities: { browserName: 'chrome' }
})

await browser.navigateTo('https://www.google.com/ncr')

const searchInput = await browser.$('#lst-ib')
await searchInput.setValue('WebdriverIO')

const searchBtn = await browser.$('input[value="Google Search"]')
await searchBtn.click()

console.log(await browser.getTitle()) // outputs "WebdriverIO - Google Search"

await browser.deleteSession()

See the raw protocol example using the webdriver package to get a glance at the differences.

For more information on options, multiremote usage or integration into cloud services please check out the docs.

Package Sponsors:

Changelog

v9.20.0 (2025-09-27)

:rocket: New Feature

• wdio-allure-reporter
  • #14719 Update wdio-allure-reporter for Allure 3 (@todti)

:bug: Bug Fix

• webdriver
  • #14760 fix(webdriver): Fix no retrying requests when unexpected token on responses occurs (like on HTML responses) (@Nyaran)
• wdio-cucumber-framework
  • #14763 feat(cucumber): Fix skipping tests with skip tag using complex regular expressions (@Nyaran)
• wdio-allure-reporter
  • #14723 fix(@wdio/allure-reporter): Encode HTML entities (@sventschui)
• webdriverio
  • #14714 fix(attach-params): user options should override detectBackend (@NaamuKim)
• wdio-utils
  • #14750 feat(utils): Fix reduce function to use the initial value parameter (@Nyaran)

:nail_care: Polish

• wdio-browserstack-service
  • #14783 Exhaustive logging for better capability flow debug (@pranay-v29)
  • #14781 SDK-4104 Updated the build url format for azure pipelines (@pranay-v29)
• wdio-cli, wdio-config
  • #14664 tsConfigPath in wdio.conf (@sh41)
• webdriverio
  • #14744 fix: polish waitForClickable (@wswebcreation)
  • #14745 fix: polish isStable commands (@wswebcreation)
• wdio-browserstack-service, wdio-local-runner
  • #14734 Support added for change in product name:- Observability -> Test Reporting and Analytics v9 (@Tanmay-Bstack)

:memo: Documentation

• Other
  • #14786 Updated refs due to changes in the example-recipes repo (@fpereira1)
  • #14787 Update docs on selector to warn that aria/ selectors can be slow (@fpereira1)
  • #14776 corrected typo in the index page (@alphabetkrish)
• wdio-junit-reporter
  • #14735 docs(@wdio/junit-reporter): update readme (@eglitise)

:house: Internal

• #14748 chore(.nvmrc) upgrade node version to fix continuous release (@NaamuKim)

Committers: 15

• Alex (@todti)
• David Prevost (@dprevost-LMI)
• Edgars Eglītis (@eglitise)
• Erkan Erol (@erkanerol)
• Filype (@fpereira1)
• Luis Zurro (@Nyaran)
• Luke (@NaamuKim)
• Nathan Zhao (@phantomwolf)
• Pranay Varma (@pranay-v29)
• Steve Hall (@sh41)
• Sven (@sventschui)
• Ulises Gascón (@UlisesGascon)
• Wim Selles (@wswebcreation)
• @Tanmay-Bstack
• @alphabetkrish

Similar packages

Other packages similar to webdriverio

selenium-webdriver

Selenium WebDriver is one of the most popular browser automation tools. It requires setting up a standalone server and writing more boilerplate code compared to WebdriverIO, which provides a more concise API and integrated test runner support.

puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library developed by the Chrome DevTools team. It provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Puppeteer is typically faster and more stable for Chrome/Chromium automation because it uses the DevTools protocol, but it does not support multiple browsers out of the box like WebdriverIO does.

cypress

Cypress is a front-end testing tool built for the modern web. It is both a library for writing tests as well as a test runner. It offers a rich interactive interface for running tests but is limited to running tests within its own browser-based test runner, which can be a limitation compared to WebdriverIO's support for various browsers and mobile platforms.

nightwatch

Nightwatch.js is an automated testing framework for web applications and websites, written in Node.js and using the W3C WebDriver API. It is similar to WebdriverIO but has its own test runner and asserts library, which can make it easier to set up and start writing tests. However, it might not be as feature-rich as WebdriverIO in terms of community plugins and integrations.