Start a new web suite in Playwright. Stay on Selenium if you need a language binding Playwright does not ship, Internet Explorer mode, or a grid that already runs your tests every day. Both tools leave you the same job: the locators you write break when the UI changes.
Here is the comparison, then the cases where each one is the right call.
Selenium vs Playwright at a glance
| Selenium | Playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| First release | 2004 | 2020 |
| Official language bindings | Java, Python, C#, Ruby, JavaScript | TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Java, .NET |
| Browsers | Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer mode through IEDriver | Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, plus branded Chrome and Edge |
| How it drives the browser | The W3C WebDriver protocol, through a driver process per browser | One protocol per engine, over a persistent connection |
| Waiting | Implicit and explicit waits that you write | Auto-waiting for actionability before each action |
| Test runner | None. You bring JUnit, pytest, NUnit or another runner | Built in, with parallel workers, retries and sharding |
| Debug artifacts | Screenshots and logs from your runner | Trace viewer, video, and codegen in the box |
| Distributed runs | Selenium Grid, or a vendor browser cloud | Shards across CI machines, or a vendor browser cloud |
| Native mobile apps | Not directly. Appium reuses the WebDriver protocol | Not supported. Device emulation covers mobile web only |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
Both projects are Apache 2.0 and free to run. The cost is the time your engineers spend on the suite, not the licence.
Pick Playwright when
- You are writing the suite now. Auto-waiting removes the sleep calls that make a new Selenium suite flaky in its first month.
- You test a single-page app. Playwright waits for an element to be attached, visible, stable and enabled before it clicks.
- You need Safari coverage in CI. WebKit runs on Linux runners, so you do not need a macOS machine for it.
- You want the failure to explain itself. The trace viewer replays the run with the DOM, the network and the console at each step.
- Your pipeline time is the problem. The runner shards a suite across CI machines without a grid to operate.
Stay on Selenium when
- Your teams write tests in several languages, and WebDriver is the one API all of them share.
- You test Internet Explorer mode in Edge, which Playwright does not drive.
- A Selenium Grid already runs your suite. A grid that works is not a reason to rewrite 500 tests.
- A device cloud or an internal service in your stack accepts WebDriver traffic only.
What the migration actually costs
The syntax is the cheap part. A coding agent converts a Selenium test to Playwright in seconds, and the conversion is a rename of the API calls.
The expensive part is the waiting model. A Selenium test that passes because of an explicit wait of five seconds becomes a Playwright test that either waits for the wrong thing or hides a race. Every converted test needs a run and a review before you trust it.
Convert twenty tests first, time the work, then plan the rest. Our Selenium to Playwright migration guide has the order to do it in.
What neither tool fixes
Both tools ask you to name the element. A CSS selector, an XPath, a test id, a role and an accessible name: each one is a promise about the markup. The promise breaks when a designer moves a button into a new component.
That is the maintenance bill on a browser suite, and it does not appear in a feature comparison. Playwright makes the promise easier to write with role based locators. It still fails when the role changes.
Two guides go deeper: why Playwright locators break , and how to fix flaky tests by root cause.
Where Momentic fits
Momentic is the third option, and it answers the maintenance question rather than the speed question. You write a step in plain English. The step is saved as YAML in your repository, next to the code it tests.
At run time the step resolves against the page that is on screen. When the markup moves, the run re-resolves the target and writes the repair back, so the next pull request carries the fix as a diff you review.
Your coding agent writes the tests over the Momentic MCP server , and the CLI runs them locally and in CI, with an exit code your merge gate can read.
Retool moved to Momentic and reports 8x more releases and over 40 engineering hours saved each month. Read how they did it .
Which one should you start with
New suite, one language, modern web app: Playwright. Multi-language estate or a working grid: Selenium. A suite that already passes and costs you a day a week to keep passing: the tool is not the problem, the locators are.