The Playwright MCP alternative that remembers

The short answer: if your agent does the same website tasks again and again, Dejo is the Playwright MCP alternative that remembers them. It learns a task once, then replays it in one tool call with no page reading. In our test over 30 fresh Claude sessions per tool, it used 52% fewer tool calls and 47% fewer tokens than Playwright MCP. For one-off tasks and cross-browser testing, Playwright MCP is still a good choice.

How the options compare

"Not measured" means we have not run that tool through our benchmark yet; the rest of its row comes from its official docs (checked 18 October 2026).

Why people look for a Playwright MCP alternative

Playwright MCP is Microsoft's official browser server for AI agents, and it works well. The complaint is cost. Every action returns a snapshot of the page, the model reads it, decides, and acts again. A short task can take several calls, and each call carries a page's worth of text.

The bigger cost is repetition. A new chat starts from nothing, so if you ask your agent to check the same dashboard every morning, it reads the same pages and makes the same decisions every morning.

Here is one task from our benchmark, run ten times, each in a brand-new Claude session:

The task: open github.com/microsoft/playwright, go to Issues, and say how many are open.

Playwright MCP does the same work every time. Dejo does it once, saves the route with a check on every step, and from then on one dejo_run call walks it in plain code. The two calls are the agent finding the tool and calling it.

Over all three tasks: Dejo 96 tool calls and 4.6M tokens, Playwright MCP 199 calls and 8.7M tokens. Full method and raw data: the benchmark.

What Dejo does differently

• It remembers the route. The first run explores; every run after replays. No snapshots, no reasoning, zero model calls inside Dejo.
• It checks every step. Each saved step carries a check that proves it landed: the page changed, the file downloaded, the field holds what was typed. That is how it tells a changed site from a working one.
• It repairs only what moved. Each step keeps up to nine ways to find its control. If all of them fail, Dejo stops at that one step and your agent picks the new control. The rest of the route is untouched.
• It keeps you signed in, safely. You sign in yourself in a real window, once. Passwords never go into memory. Several accounts can stay signed in side by side. See Signing in.

When Playwright MCP is the better choice

Be honest with yourself about what you need:

• One-off tasks. If you will never do the task again, there is nothing to remember. Dejo's first run costs more than Playwright MCP's, because it also saves the route.
• One page, one line. "Open this page and read the title" takes two or three calls with any tool. In our one-page tests on six sites, Dejo used more tokens than Playwright MCP on five of them.
• Cross-browser testing. Playwright MCP can drive Firefox and WebKit. Dejo drives Chrome or Chromium only.
• Tests you want as Playwright code. Playwright's tools are built for that. Dejo's routes are its own format.

The other alternatives

• Playwright CLI, also from Microsoft. Its README says CLI commands are "more token-efficient" than MCP because they avoid loading tool schemas and page trees into the model; snapshots are saved to files instead. It is the better pick for coding agents that write tests. It does not remember tasks between sessions.
• Chrome DevTools MCP, from Google's Chrome team, for controlling and inspecting a live Chrome: network requests, console, performance. Best for debugging a page. See Chrome DevTools MCP vs Playwright MCP.
• Claude in Chrome, Anthropic's extension. Claude Code works inside your own Chrome, with all your sign-ins, in a visible window. Needs a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise plan.
• agent-browser, from Vercel Labs: a fast command-line browser for agents, with filters that shrink snapshots.

Switch in a minute

pip install dejo-mcp
playwright install chromium
claude mcp add --scope user dejo -- dejo-mcp

Then ask your agent for something on a website, in your own words. Other agents: Codex, Cursor.

FAQ