Playwright vs. Selenium – Who Wins and Why?

When it comes to automating functional test cases, Selenium is still one of the most popular tools even today. It offers broad support for browsers and programming languages, is open-source, and provides a large ecosystem of plugins and integrations with other tools such as JUnit. However, over the past few years, Microsoft’s open-source tool Playwright, released in 2020, has established itself as a serious alternative to Selenium and is increasingly being used in projects. In this article, we’ll compare both tools, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and see how they perform in different categories.

Playwright vs. Selenium Setup

The first difference becomes obvious during setup. With Selenium, things can quickly become complicated. The required libraries, plugins, and browsers (including compatible drivers such as geckodriver or chromedriver) need to be installed and managed. Even when using build tools like Maven, this requires considerable effort.

Playwright, on the other hand, is much easier to set up and maintain. Once Node.js is installed, the Playwright package can simply be added via a package manager such as npm. With a single command, all required browser binaries can be downloaded and managed.

Programming Languages and Browser Support

Here lies one of Selenium’s greatest strengths: it offers the widest support for both programming languages and browsers. Selenium doesn’t just support Java and Python but also JavaScript, C#, and Ruby. In addition, there are bindings for PHP, Perl, Groovy, Scala, Go, Haskell, R, and more. This diversity makes Selenium especially flexible for teams working with different languages or having specific requirements.

Playwright, written in TypeScript, now supports not only TypeScript/JavaScript but also Python, Java, and C#. While the selection is smaller, it still covers the most commonly used languages.

When it comes to browsers, Selenium also has broader coverage: in addition to Chrome and Firefox, it supports Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, and even Opera. Playwright, by contrast, focuses on Chromium (including branded versions like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge), Firefox, and Safari’s underlying engine, WebKit. This means Playwright does not directly support Safari itself, nor Internet Explorer or Opera. Another difference: Selenium supports older browser versions, which is particularly helpful when testing legacy systems. Playwright, however, is geared toward modern versions, with easier browser setup and management.

Browser Communication

The way both tools communicate with browsers differs significantly. Playwright interacts with browsers directly. For example, in the case of Chromium, Playwright communicates through the DevTools protocol. Selenium, however, does not communicate directly with the browser. Instead, it uses the WebDriver standard and therefore requires a separate driver for each browser, which acts as a bridge.

This approach provides Selenium with broader browser compatibility, but Playwright’s direct communication results in lower complexity, fewer errors, faster execution, and easier setup and management.

Waits and Asynchrony

Handling timing issues (e.g., how long to wait before clicking an element) is a critical part of automated test implementation. Modern web apps often contain asynchronous components or dynamically generated/loaded content.

Here, Playwright has a clear advantage. Playwright tests are inherently asynchronous, making them well-suited for dealing with dynamic elements. Additionally, Playwright integrates waits directly into actions via so-called actionability checks. For example, when clicking, it automatically ensures the target element is unique, visible, and enabled. This avoids many timing issues without requiring manual handling by the tester, resulting in more stable and faster tests.

Selenium, meanwhile, offers many ways to handle waits—both implicit and explicit (e.g., WebDriverWait). However, these must be implemented and configured manually, which introduces the risk of slower and less reliable tests.

Element Handling and Selectors

Playwright also has an edge here. Selenium supports common selectors such as XPath or CSS, but these can become complex depending on the web app’s structure and negatively impact test maintainability.

Playwright supports these selectors as well, but also offers additional features. Elements can be identified by text content, labels, or ARIA roles. It also allows chaining multiple locators with a simple syntax, making element targeting easier. Working with elements like iframes or shadow DOM is also more straightforward in Playwright than in Selenium.

Features

One of Selenium’s greatest strengths is its extensibility, thanks to a wide range of plugins and integration into frameworks like JUnit. This makes its potential feature set virtually limitless. However, adding useful test features such as screenshots, video recording, logging, device emulation, or parallel execution usually requires significant effort.

In Playwright, these features are already built in and can be integrated into tests much more easily.

Community Support

Here, Selenium shines again. As an open-source project with over 20 years of history, it enjoys long-standing popularity and a very large community. This makes it easy to find quick and effective solutions to problems. There’s also a huge ecosystem of plugins and integrations with existing frameworks and platforms.

Playwright, being relatively new, naturally has a smaller community. But thanks to its rising popularity and adoption in more automation projects, its community is growing rapidly.

Conclusion

So, the decisive question: Which tool should you choose for your automation project? The answer depends heavily on individual requirements and circumstances.

• Do you need seamless integration into a large, existing software landscape?
• Do you need to test legacy systems with older frameworks?
• Do you require the widest possible browser coverage, including Internet Explorer?
• Is a large, established community with extensive support important?

In these cases, Selenium is often still the better choice. Thanks to its long history, wide language and browser support—including older versions—it plays to its strengths here.

• Is your application built with modern technologies and frameworks?
• Does it include many asynchronous or dynamic components?
• Are performance, stability, and maintainability crucial?
• Do you want a simple, streamlined setup?

Then Playwright is worth considering. With its modern architecture, strong performance, and built-in features like support for multiple browser engines, it is often the more suitable option.

In short:

__- If you need maximum compatibility and broad support, Selenium is usually the better fit. - If you want to test modern web applications as efficiently, stably, and quickly as possible, Playwright is the way to go. __ As is often the case in software development: the right tool depends entirely on the requirements, infrastructure, and priorities of the project.

FAQs

Do I really have to choose one of the two?

Not necessarily. Some projects use both in parallel—for example, Selenium for legacy browsers not supported by Playwright, and Playwright for modern apps. This way, you can benefit from the strengths of each.

(How to use Selenium and Playwright at the same time Without Pain | by Lopezm Didac | Medium)

How important is support for older browsers today?

That depends on your target audience. For public websites accessed on older corporate PCs or outdated operating systems, Internet Explorer or old Safari versions may still be relevant. For modern SaaS products or internal applications, focusing on current versions of Chrome, Edge, and Firefox is usually sufficient—the exact focus of Playwright.

Why is Selenium setup more complex?

Because Selenium follows the WebDriver standard, requiring a separate driver for each browser. These drivers must be maintained, kept up-to-date, and matched to the correct versions. Playwright, on the other hand, downloads matching browser binaries directly and manages them automatically.

What about mobile testing?

Selenium, together with Appium, can test native mobile apps (Android & iOS). Playwright, however, can only emulate mobile browser views (e.g., iPhone viewport). Native apps cannot be tested with Playwright.