Playwright stealth in 2026: why 1 plugin cannot hide CDP

Playwright is the test framework underneath Playwright MCP and browser-use, and "playwright stealth" is what people search for when the first site refuses it. There are two packages behind that phrase, one for Python and one for Node, and both are still downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a week. We read their source and our own recordings of Playwright's input on 24 September 2026 to see which of Playwright's traces they cover.

What is playwright-stealth?

playwright-stealth is the name of two small packages that inject evasion scripts into every page Playwright opens. In Python it is the playwright_stealth package, which describes itself as a "Fork of AtuboDad's port of puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth, with some improvements". In Node it is playwright-extra, "a modular plugin framework for playwright", which loads the Puppeteer stealth plugin with chromium.use(StealthPlugin()).

The Node side has not changed since March 2023. The Python side ships releases, and its README is candid about the result: "Don't expect this to bypass anything but the simplest of bot detection methods. Consider this a proof-of-concept starting point."

What does it patch and what not?

The Python package patches values a script inside the page can reach, and nothing below that, the shallowest of the three depths at which a stealth browser can work. Its source holds 18 evasion scripts and 19 switches, one for each script plus one that rewrites the sec-ch-ua client hints. We sorted the surfaces a detector reads by whether one of those scripts touches them.

The WebGL default is the same fixed Intel pair on every machine, so a scene drawn by the real graphics card, or by a software renderer where no GPU is available, comes back next to a string that describes different hardware.

Why does Playwright itself get detected?

Playwright gets detected through the protocol it speaks and the events it sends, and an evasion script reaches neither. In Ian L. Paterson's benchmark of 7 tools against 31 targets, published on 13 May 2026, vanilla Playwright reached 24 targets and rebrowser-playwright, a patched fork, the same 24. His conclusion: "Playwright forks fail regardless of patch quality, and defeating that layer takes a control plane that is not Playwright."

The input is the second trace. We recorded Playwright's two ways of entering text on our signature bench, two runs each, against Chrome 141 on 24 August 2026.

A person cannot put a sentence into a field without a single key event, and no keyboard produces a capital letter without Shift or Caps Lock. playwright-stealth changes none of this, because the events come from Playwright's driver and not from a value the page could read.

Is Patchright the better Playwright?

Patchright is the better Playwright for protocol leaks and the same Playwright for everything else. It patches Runtime.enable and Console.enable inside the driver, which an evasion script cannot do, and in Paterson's benchmark it reached 25 of 31 against vanilla Playwright's 24. Its list of patches names no fingerprint surface and no change to input; the Patchright review puts Playwright's input next to Puppeteer's and Selenium's.

So which should you use?

Our verdict: playwright-stealth is a reasonable first step on a site that checks a handful of JavaScript values, and it stops there, as its own README says. The human input page of the documentation describes what an input layer has to produce instead, and the Playwright migration guide shows how existing Playwright code attaches to a profile over CDP.