Not all automation tools are made equal. But if you read too many internet blogs on each, you might find yourself questioning whether there’s any real difference between the big, established players.
So it is with the question of Playwright vs Selenium.
If you’ve fallen down a comparison hole, this blog will help you out. We’ll highlight the differences that actually matterand consider some modern alternatives that address the issues these traditional automation tools can’t.
Playwright vs Selenium: A Quick Overview
Selenium: The OG of Modern Testing Tools
If you’ve been anywhere near QA testing over the past two decades, you’ll have encountered Selenium in one way or another.
First introduced in 2004, the open source framework Selenium has become the de facto standard for automated web UI testing. Its longevity has resulted in a mature ecosystem, broad language support, and an established online community.
Playwright: The Modern Challenger
Developed by Microsoft and released in 2020, Playwright was designed with modern web applications in mind. It provides robust APIs for browser automation, supports major browsers, and handles single-page applications (SPAs), asynchronous content, and modern JavaScript frameworks particularly well.
Playwright vs Selenium: Key Differences
1. Architecture and Browser Control
Selenium uses the WebDriver protocol to drive browser interactions, with WebDriver acting as a bridge between the automation script and the browser. This can introduce performance overhead, especially in complex tests – things slow down the more your test suite expands.
Playwright interacts with browser engines at a lower level, resulting in faster, more reliable execution than Selenium and reduced flakiness. Out-of-box, Playwright is a clear winner here.
2. Cross-Browser Support
You can run tests in Selenium for virtually any browser, thanks to the widespread adoption of the WebDriver standard. Whether you want your app to run in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, or something else, you’re probably covered.
Playwright isn’t quite as extensive, but covers all major bases – Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers are supported with a single API. You’ll get a little more polish from Playwright too, with more reliability and support for headless execution.
3. Language Support
One of Selenium’s biggest strengths is the flexibility it offers in programming languages – teams can write tests in Java, Python, C#, Ruby, JavaScript, and more. This is particularly useful for teams with complex existing stacks, and for adapting the tool’s use to the engineering talent you have to hand.
Playwright supports fewer languages, but hits most mainstream options with JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET all supported. It offers less flexibility than Selenium, but with the exception of odd legacy apps or something pretty specialist, chances are you’re covered.
4. Handling Modern Web App Complexities
To make modern web apps dynamic, many teams use frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue for code splitting, asynchronous rendering, and component virtualization. This adds a level of complexity to modern test automation.
Selenium really struggles with this because it wasn’t designed to address the issue back in 2004. Synchronization issues are common – Selenium can be prone to flaky tests when dealing with asynchronous content.
Playwright, as a more modern tool, was designed with dynamic web apps in mind. Users benefit from out-of-the-box waiting mechanisms, and the tool can intercept network requests and monitor page events. This offers engineers more control, and results in tests for dynamic web apps flaking less.
5. Community and Ecosystem
Selenium has been going since 2004. As a result, it boasts a massive online community, countless tutorials, many integrations with CI tools, and plenty of third-party libraries for customization.
Playwright’s ecosystem isn’t as extensive – but thanks to its growing popularity, you’ll find plenty of resources online. Expect thorough community support, extensive documentation, and official plugins for test runners like Jest, Mocha, and pytest.
6. Parallel Execution and Performance
You can run parallel tests in Selenium via Selenium Grid. Like many things in Selenium, however, this often requires additional infrastructure setup and maintenance. So, you save time by running tests in parallel, but you will lose some of that on configuration.
Playwright offers built-in parallel test execution, making it easier for teams to scale testing without complex infrastructure. If parallelization is a dealmaker for your choice of automated testing tool, Playwright is probably a better option.
Playwright vs Selenium: An Outdated Question for Modern Software Teams?
Consider Selenium the elder statesman of the software testing world. It’s done plenty of good, but lacks the features and approach to stay relevant much longer. Meanwhile, despite being a significantly more recent comer to the scene, Playwright still has a few gaps in its capabilities – you’ll feel these especially keenly as the potential AI solutions offer becomes apparent.
In particular, both options still create issues around:
Maintenance Overhead
Despite limited low-code test creation options (via record-and-playback), both frameworks rely on you being able to write test scripts manually and update them to reflect UI changes. This is a time drain and diverts resources from higher-value work.
Flaky Tests
Despite some autowait features, UI tests still experience issues when dealing with timing problems, third-party script changes, and inconsistent environments. This can lead to false positives or intermittent failures that undermine confidence in test results.
Learning Curve
Understanding selectors, synchronization, test structure, and tool configuration takes time – especially if you’re a small team setting up from scratch. There’s plenty of support available via docs and community, but wouldn’t you rather spend this time on something better?
Infrastructure Requirements
Running UI tests at scale often requires browsers, containers, or grid infrastructure. This adds complexity and cost, especially when tests are part of CI/CD pipelines.
Limited Intelligence
You code, it runs. This will save time, but doesn’t add anything intelligent to the software testing process. Neither Selenium nor Playwright can infer intent, suggest tests, or adapt to UI changes intelligently – newer solutions can, and it makes all the difference to your team’s workloads.
Why AI-Driven Test Automation Should Be Your First Choice
There’s nothing wrong with Playwright or Selenium – these issues aren’t due to any fundamental design flaw. They’re common to many traditional automation frameworks because when they were released, the technology available wasn’t enough to address them.
Now, however, AI is redefining what software testing looks like, its scope, and what you can expect from testing tools. In short: AI decimates the workload created by manually coding and maintaining tests, whilst allowing you to test more of your code more quickly.
This means fewer bugs shipped to production, faster feedback loops, and happier engineers. Here are a few features that you should look for.
1. Automated Test Creation
Record-and-playback is all well and good, but natural language test creation is so much quicker. Describe what you want to test, then let the AI create it. It’s as simple as that. Agentic AI features can also suggest tests autonomously based on user flows and requirements fdocuments.
You build test coverage much quicker (how does 80% in two days sound?) and open up testing to non-technical QA team members, for increased speed and transparency across your organization.
2. Self-Healing Tests
One of the biggest pain points of script-based automation is test breakage due to UI changes. Traditional autowait features reduce this, but don’t eliminate it.
AI solutions can recognize elements contextually, so that tests adapt to changes in selectors or layouts without manual updates. This makes a huge difference to flake rates and minimizes the time your team spends on maintenance.
3. Intelligent Test Coverage
AI tools like Momentic can analyze application behavior and usage patterns to identify gaps in test coverage. Rather than relying solely on human intuition, AI ensures that test suites reflect real user risks and high-impact areas.
4. Built-In Analytics and Insights
AI-driven testing tools often come with dashboards and analytics that provide visibility into quality metrics, failures, and risks. Agentic AI can even analyze your app and its test results autonomously, to identify trends and suggest focus areas for your human team.
Selenium, Playwright, and other traditional automation frameworks don’t often provide this out of the box – you can integrate third-party tools or libraries, but this comes with its own complications and time cost.
Playwright vs Selenium? Consider Momentic as an Alternative
"It’s like giving someone your QA checklist and watching them execute it for you"
Sriram Sundarraj (Engineering Lead, Retool)
We’re not exaggerating – Momentic’s AI testing features really are that powerful. We offer natural language test creation, agentic AI, self-healing tests, and more, in one intuitive solution. Install day one. Test day one.
Does it work? Just ask our client Retool, who 4x’ed their release cadence and saved over 40 engineering hours per month after implementing Momentic.
Want to join them? Talk to our sales team today.
