Alternative to DataDog for Playwright Testing

In this article, we'll compare Currents and DataDog specifically for Playwright testing, to help you make an informed decision. We'll be looking at DataDog's Test Optimization product.

Overview

DataDog

DataDog is a widely respected observability platform trusted by engineering teams across the globe. With deep integrations across infrastructure, applications, and services, it offers powerful tools for monitoring, logging, tracing, and more. Its testing solution supports Playwright through its JavaScript tracer, offering features like flaky test detection, analytics, code coverage and more.

How it Works

DataDog does not offer a native Playwright reporter, and instead uses a Tracer to instrument tests and collect telemetry. It uses Node's diagnostics_channel to listen to Playwright lifecycle events.

DataDog’s approach, while useful, is more limited than a native Playwright reporter. Without native integration, it lacks deep runtime awareness and access to Playwright-specific metadata, making it less effective for debugging and observability.

1. Playwright runs on your own CI/CD pipeline.
2. Playwright uses browsers running on your CI.
3. Test execution is traced via the Datadog Tracer and visualized in the Datadog dashboard.

Currents

Currents is a cloud-based test observability platform designed to optimize test execution. It is particularly effective for managing large test suites and ensuring their reliability over time.

Currents is designed as a best-in-class Playwright observability platform. Its native Playwright reporter integrates with existing CI/CD pipelines to optimize test execution, provide real-time insights, and enhance team productivity. It offers reporting, debugging, analytics, flaky test detection, faster executions with test orchestration, and historical insights.

How it Works

1. Playwright runs on your own CI/CD pipeline.
2. Currents orchestrates test execution to optimize parallel runs.
3. Playwright uses browsers running on your CI.
4. Test results are collected in the Currents dashboard.

Highlights

1. Playwright Native Capabilities

DataDog provides a helpful view into the trace of your Playwright tests; however, it lacks key debugging artifacts such as screenshots, video recordings, and terminal output. Without these, it can be harder to understand what actually happened during a failing test or reproduce bugs locally. Additionally, test results are only reported after execution is complete, rather than streamed in near real time, making it harder to catch issues early and potentially less resilient to crashes or CI timeouts.

DataDog also lacks data and visual cues to indicate which Playwright project a test belongs to. Since Playwright projects are commonly used to run the same test suite across multiple browsers, this creates confusion in the dashboard. Test runs appear duplicated, with no indication of whether a given result came from Chromium, Firefox, or WebKit. You just see the same test name multiple times and can’t tell which browser or configuration it was run against, without going deeper into the test details.

By contrast, Currents shows you everything! Even when a test crashes or times out. Since each step is streamed in near real-time, each test attempt is tracked with full context: logs, errors, console output, traces, screenshots, and videos. You can immediately see the last executed step before the failure, making it much easier to understand what went wrong and fix the issue quickly.

Furthermore, Currents has full support for Playwright's native capabilities, including test annotations, trace viewer, code coverage and visual testing.

Capability	DataDog	Currents
Logs	✅	✅
Errors	✅	✅
Screenshots	❌	✅
Videos	❌	✅
Projects	❌	✅
Tags	❌	✅
Trace Viewer	❌	✅
Attachments	❌	✅
Annotations	❌	✅   Learn more
Code Coverage	❌	✅   Learn more
Visual Testing	❌	✅   Learn more

Note: Although Playwright tags are not supported, DataDog supports their own tags with custom Playwright annotations. DataDog also has code coverage support, but it is not available for Playwright as of June 25th, 2025.

2. Speeding up Tests

While fundamentally different, both products offer smart solutions to accelerate test execution. However, DataDog’s solution isn’t available for Playwright, and it currently offers no alternative to help speed up Playwright tests.

DataDog: Test Impact Analysis automatically selects and runs only the relevant tests for a given commit based on the code being changed. As of June 25th, 2025, this feature does not support on Playwright, and is only available for Jest, Mocha, Cucumber, and Cypress.

Currents: Orchestration smartly distributes your tests to be run in parallel, reducing the time it takes to run your tests and cutting CI costs.

3. GitHub Integration

DataDog: Supports posting test summaries as comments to GitHub PRs. Additionally, it provides convenient shortcuts to create issues in GitHub, which can be useful for open source projects, or companies using GitHub as their primary issue tracker.

Currents: Supports posting test summaries as comments to GitHub PRs, and commit status checks, which helps teams quickly understand test results in context, block merges on failed tests, and surface flaky or quarantined tests directly in the developer workflow.

Feature Comparison Table

Here's a detailed comparison of how these two solutions stack up against each other:

Category	DataDog	Currents
Setup & Integration	Not a reporter Process-level instrumentation	Single package installation Minimal configuration needed
Test Execution and Performance	Auto Test Retries	Advanced test orchestration Smart test distribution Playwright Sharding Re-run only failed tests Running Failed Specs First Fail-Fast Strategy CI Tests on Spot Instances
Reporting	Flaky test detection	Real-time test results streaming Flaky test detection Automated email reports
Debug Capabilities	Trace Viewer	Screenshots, Videos & Artifacts Network logs and console data Real-time reporting Step-by-step execution logs Tags Interactive trace viewer
Analytics	Test Health Test Performance & Trends Views	Trend analysis and insights Code Coverage Performance bottleneck analysis
Workflow Automation	CI/CD integration Monitors API Access	Currents Actions CI/CD integrations API Access Webhooks
Team Collaboration	Real-time team access Shared dashboards Many integrations	Real-time team access Shared dashboards Notes Slack integration MS Teams integration GitHub integration GitLab integration BitBucket integration
Security	Many security certifications SSO/SAML integration Role-based access	SOC 2 Type 2 compliance SSO/SAML integration Secure artifact storage Role-based access
Infrastructure	Cloud-based platform Zero maintenance Automatic scaling Built-in redundancy	Cloud-based platform Zero maintenance Automatic scaling Built-in redundancy
Cost Model	Subscription-based Different products charges separately Email & Chat support included	Subscription-based Predictable pricing Includes all features Email & Chat support included

Conclusion

Datadog is a strong choice for teams looking to extend their existing observability stack into the testing space. While it offers a broad set of features for test optimization and CI visibility, most of these are not yet supported for Playwright. This limits its usefulness for teams relying on Playwright for end-to-end testing.

For teams invested in Playwright, using a platform with a native reporter is key to fully leverage the framework’s capabilities. Currents stands out as the purpose-built choice. With native Playwright support, real-time streaming, intelligent orchestration, and deep GitHub/GitLab integrations. Currents enables faster feedback cycles, deeper debugging, simpler CI workflows, and more efficient scaling.

---

Join the growing community of teams using Currents for their Playwright tests

Trademarks and logos mentioned in this text belong to their respective owners.