How to Check an Element's Existence in Playwright

Ensuring an element's presence is a fundamental task in Playwright, crucial for actions like clicking on the element or determining the test outcome based on its existence.

Below are several strategies for this purpose:

1. Assessing element visibility

To ascertain an element's visibility, apply the isVisible() method to a locator:

const visible = await page.getByRole('button').isVisible();
if (visible) {
    // do something
}

For direct visibility assertions, utilize toBeVisible():

await expect(page.getByRole('button')).toBeVisible();

To assert the inverse, that an element is hidden, use the not property:

await expect(page.getByRole('button')).not.toBeVisible();

2. Checking DOM presence

To check if an element is present in the DOM, regardless of its visibility, use the count() method:

const count = await page.getByRole('button').count();
if (count > 1) {
    // do something
}

For precise assertions on an element's presence, toHaveCount() is recommended:

// Exactly one element matching the locator is present
await expect(page.getByRole('button')).toHaveCount(1);

To verify the absence of an element, proceed as follows:

await expect(page.getByRole('button')).toHaveCount(0);

Thanks for reading, and happy coding!

Got an article suggestion? Let us know

Explore more

The Top 10 Playwright Alternatives in 2025

Playwright is a powerful, open-source, front-end monitoring tool, but it's not right for everyone. Check out these Playwright alternatives.

Comparisons

End-to-End Testing with Playwright

Learn to learn to develop and execute Playwright test scripts, utilize its time travel debugging capabilities, and proactively identify visual regressions in this hands-on guide

Guides

Playwright Testing Essentials

Explore the basics of Playwright in this guide covering its key features and setup, with examples demonstrating end-to-end web app testing

Guides

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.