Selenium vs Playwright: That is Not the Question

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of tests failing due to a button changing class…or to just find a better way of doing tests. 

If you’re new to test automation, Selenium vs Playwright is a natural question to ask. It’s also quickly becoming outdated – there are better options out there that are more efficient and don’t tie you to slow, inefficient QA practices that are only holding your release cadence back.  

Here’s an overview of each platform, a comparison of their relative merits, and what you should be considering as an alternative. 

Selenium vs Playwright: Your Top-Level Overview

Selenium (The Veteran of Browser Automation)

Selenium dates all the way back to 2004, and back then, it was pretty radical. Automated software testing was around, but expensive – Selenium’s powerful, open source API made the technology considerably more accessible. It’s now established as one of the go-to options for automation due to its mature community and large, diverse ecosystem. 

Playwright (Modern and Fast-Evolving)

Playwright is newer on the scene, and was designed to solve many of the frustrations modern teams had with existing automation tools, including flaky tests and difficulty with single-page applications (SPAs). Adoption has been rapid since, with a healthy developer community and extensive documentation.

Selenium vs Playwright: Key Points of Comparison

1. What’s the Learning Curve Like? 

There’s no denying that Selenium takes time to learn – there are multiple APIs per supported language, and you’ll be setting up integrations for reporting, screenshots, and retries manually. 

Playwright offers a unified API across languages, a more intuitive UI for routine tasks, and more built-in testing tools. Less time spent getting the hang of things, and more approachable for those new to automated testing.  

2. Which Languages do Selenium and Playwright Support? 

Selenium is a powerful tool, with a wide range of supported languages, including Java, Python, .NET, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript. This makes it ideal for teams with multiple language needs.

Whilst not offering quite the flexibility of Selenium, Playwright is no slouch when it comes to language support, with JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET all supported. Reputationally, Playwright’s biggest strengths lie in Python and JavaScript, but all sorts of teams use it to good effect. 

3. Selenium vs Playwright – Which Offers Better Browser Support? 

Selenium works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera. You’ll also find continuing support for Internet Explorer, which is useful for teams maintaining legacy projects. 

Playwright covers Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers, so it offers a similar choice to Selenium, without the direct legacy support for Internet Explorer. 

4. How Do Selenium and Playwright Handle Dynamic Web Apps? 

If you’re building new web apps, you’re likely building pages that can change content without full reloads – SPAs, in other words. 

Selenium was built in 2004, when SPAs were just an idea (whilst the concept was discussed as early as 2003, it would be the late noughties before we saw widespread commercial usage). As you might expect, Selenium is therefore not that good at dealing with them. 

Selenium’s fixed timing model makes it hard to keep tests stable as page elements load asynchronously, leaving scope for false results and a whole lotta manual maintenance. 

Playwright offers built-in auto waits and fine-grained control over network idle states, which makes testing modern, dynamic web apps quicker and easier. That’s not surprising – Selenium’s inability to deal well with SPAs was one of the main reasons Playwright was developed! Consequently, it’s much easier to test apps built in modern frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue. 

5. Do Selenium and Playwright Offer Parallel Test Execution? 

Selenium doesn’t offer native parallel execution. Instead, you’ll need to rely on external tools like Selenium Grid or various cloud providers. So, it’s possible, but it’s slower and less convenient – as well as setup time, consider that tests will run more slowly due to serialization and network communication delays between client and server

Playwright offers native parallelization via its test runner. This is an easier and more efficient way of running tests in parallel. If you’re new to parallel test execution or want to run larger suites regularly, it’s a much better option.

6. Selenium vs Playwright: Which Has the Best Ecosystem and Community? 

Selenium wins this one – most experienced QA engineers will know how to use it, because it’s been the industry standard for so long. There’s an established community with a ton of resources, and it’s supported on nearly every cloud device/browser testing platform out there. 

Equally, Playwright isn’t far behind. Since its launch in 2020, the platform has expanded rapidly. Users enjoy an increasing number of support libraries and integrations, and extensive documentation. While Selenium’s ecosystem is still broader, Playwright’s is growing rapidly. 

Selenium vs Playwright: A Redundant Question? 

Playwright is undoubtedly better than Selenium for modern teams. It’s better at SPAs, better at running tests in parallel, and offers a much gentler learning curve – for this, you sacrifice Internet Explorer support, and are limited to slightly fewer programming languages. 

For ‘modern’ teams that are building new apps rather than maintaining legacy software, it’s a no-brainer.  

But – let’s be honest – both tools are showing their age. For all its advantages over Selenium, Playwright does not address the needs of engineering teams today. Here’s why: 

• You still need code to write tests: As well as being slow, this locks out non-technical team members and business stakeholders from running (and understanding) tests, and makes it more difficult to test as you go. Your tests are still a slowdown at the end of the development lifecycle – it’s just moderately more efficient than doing them manually
• Brittle locators mean that tests don't adapt to changes in the DOM: Hence, a constant maintenance burden that keeps you tied to outdated ‘over the wall’ QA that creates bottlenecks and makes you less agile. Auto-waits do not solve this.

TL;DR: ‘traditional’ automation keeps you tied to an outdated way of doing QA – it just helps you do it slightly more quickly. 

Here’s what you should be doing: 

• Removing barriers between engineers and QA – there is no ‘us and them’ or ‘over the wall’. Everything runs in parallel
• Shifting testing left – testing earlier and often so that bugs are easier and faster to fix

The only way to do this whilst maintaining quality and any semblance of work-life balance for your engineers is to use AI native tools like Momentic to supercharge testing speed and coverage. 

Why AI Testing Tools are the Way Forward

It’s not ‘Selenium vs Playwright’ anymore. It’s ‘Selenium or Playwright vs AI solutions’. And, performance and efficiency-wise, AI tools come out on top. Here are the features that make all the difference: 

1. Autonomous AI Agents

How much time do your engineers spend writing super detailed flows? Is it, ultimately, the best way that time could be spent? 

AI agents can:

• Observe an application’s UI and behavior
• Infer what tests should exist
• Create and run tests automatically
• Validate results and flag regressions

You expand your test coverage instantly, with minimal extra work. Those test-as-you-go efficiency gains that were impossible to achieve with traditional automation tools are now in reach. 

2. Self-Healing Tests

You don’t need to maintain an entire external QA team just to keep on top of test maintenance anymore. AI testing platforms can heal tests for you by:

• Tracking UI structure over time
• Using intent-based locators to update tests automatically with changes in the DOM
• Suggesting updates when minor UI changes occur

No more ‘test fails because a button class changed’ scenarios = team frustration levels at an all-time low. 

As for your QA team? Being blunt, you could make some short-term savings on headcount. Or, be strategic and redeploy them as a more analytical resource – QA engineers are smart people, and can add way more value when not tied down with routine maintenance. 

3. Natural Language Test Creation

Spend hours coding in JavaScript? Or, type in a few words of plain English and let your AI testing platform build the test for you in seconds?

Yes, that is a choice, and yes,  it is that simple. Here are the benefits:

• More scope for test-as-you-go, which removes slowdowns caused by finding and fixing immediately pre-release. Shift-left becomes a whole lot more achievable
• Business stakeholders can test just as easily as developers – they get instant visibility, you spend less time building tests on request, or explaining technical things to non-technical team members

Playwright vs Selenium vs Momentic: There’s Only One Choice

"It’s like giving someone your QA checklist and watching them execute it for you."
Sriram Sundarraj (Engineering Lead, Retool)

Retool 8x’ed their release cadence and saved over 40 engineering hours per month after implementing Momentic. Here’s how they did it. 

Want to join them? Talk to our engineering team today.