Cross-Framework Support
The trace format and the show-trace player are identical across WebdriverIO / Selenium / Nightwatch; this page shows where capture completeness differs. For the full trace-mode reference, see Trace Mode.
The trace pipeline lives in @wdio/devtools-core, so the trace format and the show-trace player are identical across all three adapters — the same .zip (or directory) opens in the same player regardless of which adapter produced it, and the core options (mode, traceGranularity, tracePolicy, traceFormat, filmstrip, emitArtifactsManifest, captureAssertions) are shared.
Capture completeness varies by adapter, though — WebdriverIO is the most complete; Selenium and Nightwatch cover the core flow with the gaps noted below. Framework-specific enable syntax lives on each adapter page — see Selenium and Nightwatch.
| Capability | WebdriverIO | Selenium | Nightwatch |
|---|---|---|---|
Trace mode + show-trace player | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| DOM time-travel (mutation capture) | ✅ | ✅ ¹ | ✅ |
| A11y tab + pick-locator overlay (trace player) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Transcript + Copy-for-LLM | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Per-test screenshot / video | ✅ inline Allure | ✅ inline Allure | ⚠️ produce-only ² |
emitArtifactsManifest auto-detect | ✅ | ✅ | ⚠️ opt-in only |
Retry-aware tracePolicy | ✅ | ✅ | ⚠️ retain-on-failure only ³ |
traceGranularity: 'test' | ✅ | ✅ | ⚠️ Cucumber / exports-object; BDD describe/it collapses to a session slice |
| Cucumber Feature→Scenario→Step nesting | Scenario→Step ⁴ | ✅ full | Feature→Scenario ⁵ |
| BiDi capture (console / network / exceptions) | ✅ auto | ✅ auto | ⚠️ opt-in (bidi: true + webSocketUrl) |
| Screencast (filmstrip / video) | CDP push | CDP push | polling only |
| Live-dashboard A11y tab + overlay | ✅ | trace player only | trace player only |
¹ Selenium reconstructs the DOM per navigation; anchor timing is approximate (a navigation's snapshot can lag the command that triggered it).
² Nightwatch has no live Allure attach API, so per-test artifacts are written to the trace output dir and listed in the manifest, but not attached to an Allure test.
³ Nightwatch's --retries re-runs a test internally without re-firing the plugin's per-test hooks, so the retry-aware policies (on-first-retry, retain-on-first-failure, …) degrade to retain-on-failure.
⁴ WebdriverIO does not yet carry feature-level ancestry, so its Cucumber nesting is Scenario→Step.
⁵ Nightwatch does not yet stamp per-step nesting (Feature→Scenario only).
