What authentication strategies have you used in Playwright tests?

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MoT have just published an article called Simple Playwright authentication recipes: A cookbook for software testers.

In it, I share four different authentication strategies you can use with Playwright—such as reusing login states, working with multiple users, and using API-based login to speed things up. Each recipe includes examples and tips to help you decide what fits your framework best.

What you’ll learn:

  • The significance of re-using storage states to avoid multiple logins
  • How authentication strategies can help the scalability of the automation framework
  • Different authentication recipes recommended by Playwright
  • How to choose authentication strategies based on real time use cases

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

  • Have you used a global authentication strategy in your Playwright framework? If so, what made you choose that approach? Share your experience!
  • What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced with authentication when running tests in parallel?

Let’s swap ideas and help each other level up our automation! :blush:

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Thanks for this very useful article! I’ve bookmarked it, as I’ve just written the first automated UI flow for the new version of our system, and authentication has already been on my mind. This will definitely come in handy when we need to test with users who have different permissions.

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Well written and explained

We have used a similar approach the second one in one of our projects.
It was using dotnet with C#.

1)So whenever a user logs in and on landing page
2) we stored the state in {username}.json file
3) Next time while login we check if this file exist then use otherwise login

So as many users logs in we created those many json files.

One problem that we saw was if in pipeline you are running multiple stages and users are distributed across stages then we had to re-login every time once for each stage.

This probably could be solved by logging in once in a common state and provide all files to all stages /agents via some common path.

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At QAonCloud, we use several authentication strategies in Playwright tests:

Reusing Auth State – Save login session to storageState.json and reuse it across tests for speed.
API Login – Call login APIs to get tokens or cookies, skipping the UI login step
UI Login – Automate full login only when testing SSO, MFA, or end-to-end flows.
Env Variables – Use secure credentials via environment variables in CI.
SSO Mocking – Mock or bypass SSO in test environments when needed.

These methods help us keep tests fast, secure, and reliable.

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