Get started with Playrunner
Playrunner orchestrates the Playwright suite you already have. Before the first workflow runs, there is one decision to make: where Playrunner itself runs.
Your options today
| Playrunner Cloud | Local (Docker) | Your own cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Trying Playrunner, and teams sharing work | Day-to-day development and evaluation | Keeping runs inside your own infrastructure |
| Setup time | A couple of minutes | About 15 minutes | Longer — you provision cloud resources |
| What you operate | Nothing | Docker on your machine | Cloud Run jobs in your GCP project |
| Cost | Free during the beta | Free. No license fee for permitted use | Free license; you pay your cloud provider |
| Data location | Hosted by Playrunner | Entirely on your machine | Entirely in your cloud account |
| Availability | Free beta, open to sign-ups | Available now | Available now (GCP; AWS and Azure planned) |
If you just want to see it work, use Playrunner Cloud. Go to playrunner.cloud, sign in with GitHub or Google, and you can build a workflow without installing anything.
If you would rather run it yourself, start locally. Everything works the same way, and moving execution to a cloud runner later is a setting on the node rather than a rewrite.
Workflows you build on one option carry over to the others — the workflow model is identical.
Get running
- Set up Playrunner locally — Docker, Node 20+, and about fifteen minutes.
- Create your first workflow — two nodes and a connection.
- Connect GitHub — point Playrunner at the repository holding your Playwright tests.
- Run your first test — watch node state and logs stream back live.
Moving execution to your own cloud
Once a workflow runs locally, the runner architecture section covers moving execution off your machine:
- Local runner architecture — what the local setup is actually doing.
- GCP runner architecture — Cloud Run runners, Pub/Sub messaging, and Cloud Storage for artefacts.
Going further
- Use cases — Slack alerts, Jira bugs, AI failure triage, schedules, and webhook triggers.
- Integration reference — every available node.