Donobu – Mac App for Web Automation and Testing
Been working on a desktop app for Mac that lets you create web flows and rerun them (https://www.donobu.com/). You can optionally use AI (BYOK: bring your own keys) to create flows for you and to do other interesting things, like making vision-based semantic assertions. Also, your data lives on your own filesystem, and we do not see any of it (further still, there is no phoning home at all). A nice benefit of this being a desktop app rather than a SAAS product, is that if you happen to be developing/iterating on a webpage locally, this has no problem hooking into it. What…
In plain words
Donobu is a Mac desktop app for creating and rerunning web automation flows and tests. Users can record web interactions and replay them, with optional AI assistance to generate flows and perform vision-based assertions. The app stores all data locally on the user's filesystem with no external data transmission. As a desktop application, it works with locally-running webpages during development. It's designed for testing web pages, automating repetitive tasks, and exploring websites, with smart failover mechanisms that adapt when elements change.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Been working on a desktop app for Mac that lets you create web flows and rerun them (https://www.donobu.com/). You can optionally use AI (BYOK: bring your own keys) to create flows for you and to do other interesting things, like making vision-based semantic assertions. Also, your data lives on your own filesystem, and we do not see any of it (further still, there is no phoning home at all). A nice benefit of this being a desktop app rather than a SAAS product, is that if you happen to be developing/iterating on a webpage locally, this has no problem hooking into it. What this intends to be a good fit for: - Testing web pages, especially locally. - Exploring random webpages with a stated objective. - Automating tedious flows. Rerunning a flow won't get caught up on using a single selector (many websites randomize element IDs, for instance), there is smart failover using a prioritized list of selectors. - Getting a quick draft of an end-to-end test in Javascript. What this is a bad fit for: - Mass web scraping (too slow). - Adversarial websites. What we are still working out: - Click-and-drag operations. - Websites that are primarily controlled from canvas. - Smoothing out UI/UX (we are two backend engineers trying our best, and are handedly outgunned by real frontend engineers). Fun things to try: - Asking it to assert that a webpage has a certain theme. - Asking it to run an accessibility report for a page (uses https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core). - Asking it to run a cookie report for a page. The tech: - Java 21 for the main business logic. - Javalin 6 for the web framework (https://javalin.io/). - Playwright for controlling the browser (https://playwright.dev/java/). - Axe for running accessibility reports (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core). Critical feedback is welcome. Thanks for trying it out! Cheers, -Justin and Vaz
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