Playwright vs Selenium: which should you choose?

*updated September 2025

Choosing the right web automation tool is crucial for improving your product’s quality and development process.

It can also reduce cost, ensure robustness, and support agile workflow.

Here we’ll take a closer look at two powerful options: Playwright and Selenium. 

If you’re a developer or tester, this comparison can help you make a better choice for your project.

We’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Playwright and Selenium, helping you understand when to use each tool. 

Whether you’re focused on execution speed, ease of integration, or language compatibility, we’ve got you covered. 

By the end of this blog, you’ll have the knowledge to choose the right tool for your project needs. So let’s get to it!

What is Playwright?

Playwright is a modern automation framework developed by Microsoft and built for testing web apps in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

It’s gained a lot of traction because of how fast and simple it is to set up. In fact, you can often get Playwright running in a single step — compared to Selenium, which usually takes multiple.

One of its biggest strengths is the built-in auto-wait feature. Instead of writing extra code to pause until an element loads, Playwright waits automatically.

That means fewer flaky tests and faster runs, which makes a big difference in CI pipelines.

Playwright also bundles its own drivers. Everything is managed in a single configuration file, which simplifies running tests in parallel or at scale.

For QA engineers, that means less time spent on setup and more time focusing on writing tests.

It comes with helpful developer tools too — like the Playwright Inspector for debugging and CodeGen for quickly finding locators.

These make authoring and troubleshooting tests easier than in Selenium, where you often need to handle waits and locators manually.

source: Testomat

Let’s take a look at the basic task of automating a form submission with Playwright in Python:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
def run(playwright):
    browser = playwright.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('https://example.com')
    page.fill('#name', 'John Doe')
    page.click('#submit-button')
    browser.close()
with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    run(playwright)

This snippet demonstrates launching a browser, navigating to a URL, filling out a form, and clicking a submit button.

Playwright’s Python API mirrors its Node.js counterpart, offering an intuitive and powerful way to interact with web pages programmatically.

The trade-off? Playwright’s ecosystem is still younger than Selenium’s.

If you rely on niche tools or legacy browser support, it may not be the right fit. But for modern apps, it’s quickly becoming the default choice.

Playwright pros and cons

What is Selenium?

Selenium has been around for nearly two decades and remains the most widely used framework for browser automation.

It supports the broadest range of browsers and languages, from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari to legacy options like Internet Explorer and Opera.

For large organizations with varied environments, this flexibility is still unmatched.

source: BrowserStack

With Selenium 4, the framework has caught up in important ways:

• W3C WebDriver protocol reduces driver mismatches and improves stability.
• Redesigned Selenium Grid makes it easier to run large-scale, distributed tests, with support for Docker and simple one-command setup.
• Relative locators and improved Actions API simplify writing complex user interactions.
• Selenium Manager now handles driver downloads and updates automatically.

The strengths are clear: unmatched browser coverage, a massive ecosystem of plugins, and deep community knowledge.

But the trade-off is that writing and maintaining tests often takes more work.

You’ll usually need to manage waits manually and deal with more verbose code, which can lead to brittle or flaky tests.

Debugging is also less advanced compared to Playwright. Selenium mostly relies on logs and browser dev tools, while Playwright offers built-in video and trace recording.

Its extensive community support and documentation make it a go-to choice for testers looking for a reliable and versatile testing solution.

Here’s how you might automate the same form submission task using Selenium with Python:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
driver = webdriver.Chrome('/path/to/chromedriver')
driver.get("https://example.com")
element = driver.find_element(By.ID, "name")
element.send_keys("John Doe")
driver.find_element(By.ID, "submit-button").click()
driver.quit()

This code snippet highlights Selenium’s approach to browser automation, where you manually navigate to pages, find elements, and interact with them.

It showcases Selenium’s flexibility and control over browser interactions.

Selenium pros and cons 

Playwright vs Selenium: comparison 

When deciding between Playwright and Selenium, your choice should align with your specific project requirements.

Here’s a breakdown of their features:

Playwright vs. Selenium: key differences

Now, we’ll take a look at some of these features in more detail.

Cross-browser support

Playwright focuses on modern browsers: Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.

Because it bundles drivers directly, you don’t need to download or configure them yourself. Every time you update Playwright, you get the latest browser builds, which reduces the risk of compatibility issues.

This makes Playwright great for teams who want to keep pace with modern web standards and don’t need to worry about older platforms.

Selenium, on the other hand, has always been about breadth. It supports a wide range of browsers and versions and not just the newest ones, but also legacy options like Internet Explorer and Opera.

That’s a big reason why many enterprises still rely on it: they can’t control which browsers their end users are on, so broad coverage is essential.

Language support

Playwright offers first-party bindings for JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and C#.

The big advantage is consistency: the API works the same way across all supported languages. That means if you switch from one language to another, you don’t have to rethink how your tests behave.

If you’re working mainly in JavaScript or TypeScript, Playwright is especially easy to adopt with very little ramp-up time.

Selenium’s strength here is flexibility. It supports more languages, including Ruby and Kotlin, and is widely adopted across different programming communities.

That’s why it’s still the default in many large organizations with polyglot teams.

If you’re a company that runs multiple stacks in parallel, Selenium fits right in without requiring your team to learn a new language.

Performance

Playwright is built for speed.

Tests start faster because session startup is lightweight, and actions are backed by auto-wait, so you don’t need to add manual pauses to keep them stable.

That combination cuts down on flaky results. Playwright also supports running multiple browser contexts in parallel, which makes it easier to scale test suites without slowing pipelines down.

Selenium has improved with version 4, especially with its W3C WebDriver compliance reducing driver mismatches.

But performance still depends heavily on how carefully you handle waits and synchronization.

Without that, flakiness and slower test execution are common pain points.

Even well-written Selenium suites usually run slower than Playwright because the architecture isn’t optimized in the same way.

Debugging capabilities

Playwright gives QA engineers a full debugging toolkit out of the box. The Inspector lets you pause and step through tests interactively. CodeGen generates selectors automatically, which reduces locator issues.

And when something breaks, the trace viewer and video recording show exactly what happened, so you can diagnose the issue without rerunning the test.

These tools make debugging faster, easier, and more reliable.

Selenium doesn’t offer the same experience. It relies mostly on log output and browser dev tools.

You can add plugins for screenshots, videos, and advanced reporting, but that means more setup and more moving parts.

The end result is that debugging in Selenium often takes longer and feels less efficient.

CI/CD integration

Both frameworks work well in CI/CD pipelines.

Playwright offers official Docker images and headless execution modes that make it easy to integrate with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or CircleCI.

Its design also makes running tests in parallel straightforward, which helps keep CI pipelines fast.

Selenium has a longer history in CI/CD setups and is deeply embedded in enterprise pipelines.

With Selenium Grid, you can run distributed tests across multiple machines and browsers.

That flexibility is powerful, but it requires more configuration and infrastructure planning than Playwright.

Community and support

Selenium has nearly two decades of history, which means it has an enormous ecosystem.

Whatever problem you run into, there’s likely a tutorial, plugin, or forum post that covers it.

Many vendors also build their own tools and services on top of Selenium, so support options are broad.

Playwright is newer, but its community is growing fast thanks to strong backing from Microsoft.

Each release adds new features that reduce the need for third-party plugins. Its documentation is clear, and the developer community is increasingly active in producing examples and guides.

While it doesn’t yet match Selenium’s depth of ecosystem, it’s moving quickly in that direction.

When to choose Playwright vs. Selenium?

If you’re starting a fresh project, Playwright should be your starting point. It was designed with modern apps in mind, and it shows in everyday QA work.

Setup is quick, often just a single step compared to Selenium’s multi-step process. The built-in auto-wait mechanism means tests fail less often because they don’t try to interact with elements that haven’t loaded yet. That alone saves hours of testing time.

If I were starting a new project today, I’d definitely pick Playwright. The setup is faster, the tests are less flaky, and the debugging tools save a lot of time. Selenium still makes sense if you’re stuck with older browsers or a big existing setup.

Marko Brajer, Senior QA engineer at DECODE

Playwright is also faster. Sessions spin up quickly, tests execute without long pauses, and parallelization is simple to configure in one file.

Combined with bundled drivers, this makes Playwright much easier to scale in CI pipelines without adding extra infrastructure.

Debugging is another area where it pulls ahead: Inspector, CodeGen, tracing, and video recording are all included. You can see exactly why a test failed without rerunning it locally.

In short, for most modern development teams Playwright is the better choice.

That said, Selenium still has the edge in a few edge cases:

• You must support legacy browsers like Internet Explorer or Opera.
• Your organization depends on multiple languages beyond what Playwright supports.
• You already rely on Selenium Grid or vendor tools built on WebDriver.
• You need specialized plugins or compliance tools that Playwright doesn’t yet provide.

In almost every other scenario, Playwright delivers faster, more reliable results with less effort.

Playwright vs Selenium: FAQs

Conclusion

Both Playwright and Selenium offer powerful solutions for web app testing, each with its unique strengths and considerations.

Choosing between them will depends on your specific project needs, team skills, and the types of apps you’re testing.

If you want to learn more, take a look at external resources like the official documentation for Playwright and Selenium – or, read our other blogs on quality assurance and test automation tools.