Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Playwright VS Selenium

Compare Playwright VS Selenium and see what are their differences

Playwright logo Playwright

Playwright is automation software for Chromium, Firefox, Webkit using the Node.js library having a single API in place.

Selenium logo Selenium

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.
  • Playwright Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-22
  • Selenium Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-12

Playwright videos

Generate tests in VS Code

More videos:

  • Review - Playwright Brittany K. Allen wins 2021 Georgia Engel Comedy Playwriting Prize

Selenium videos

Selenium supplements — worth it or waste of time?

More videos:

  • Review - bio true selenium review
  • Review - SELENIUM: Why You Need It and Where To Get It

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Playwright and Selenium)
Development
100 100%
0% 0
Automated Testing
19 19%
81% 81
Browser Testing
19 19%
81% 81
Website Testing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Playwright and Selenium

Playwright Reviews

Top Selenium Alternatives
Playwright offers a modern approach with auto-wait APIs and more native support for modern web features compared to Selenium's more manual and broad approach. While Selenium requires explicit waits and has a broader language support, Playwright focuses on simplifying cross-browser testing with its unified API and auto-wait features, which might reduce setup and test...
Source: bugbug.io
Top 5 Selenium Alternatives for Less Maintenance
Appium and Playwright closely resemble Selenium in terms of functionality but offer unique features and advantages. Both of these solutions require coding experience. Leapwork, a commercial vendor, uses Selenium under the hood to power their visual automation approach.
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Playwright, a Node.js library created by Microsoft, is considered one of the best JavaScript frameworks for testing. It automates Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API. Developers building JavaScript code can use these APIs to build new browser pages, go to URLs, and interact with page elements. Additionally, Playwright can automate Microsoft Edge since it is based...

Selenium Reviews

Top Selenium Alternatives
Nightwatch.js simplifies the setup and use of Selenium WebDriver, providing an abstraction layer that is easier to work with for JavaScript developers. While it offers the broad compatibility and standardization of Selenium WebDriver, it aims to improve the development experience with its simplified syntax and support for the Page Object pattern, making it a middle ground...
Source: bugbug.io
Top 5 Selenium Alternatives for Less Maintenance
And that’s why code-free test automation is important. Implementing codeless Selenium alternatives can address the challenges posed by traditional Selenium testing. They help testers with various skill sets to contribute to the testing process, enhancing collaboration and accelerating the testing lifecycle. For an in-depth discussion on the significance of codeless Selenium,...
Best Automation Testing Tools (Free and Paid) | July 2022
Automation testing is the process of testing the software using an automation tool to find the defects. In this process, executing the test scripts and generating the results are performed automatically by automation tools. Some most popular tools to do automation testing are HP QTP/UFT, Selenium WebDriver, etc.,
20 BEST Selenium Alternatives in 2021
Selenium is an open-source automated testing tool. It can perform functional, regression, load testing on web applications across different browsers and platforms. Selenium is one of the finest tools, but it does have some drawbacks.
Source: www.guru99.com
Top 10 Best Selenium Alternatives You Should Try
Selenium is a convenient and portable software testing tool specifically used for testing web applications. It acts as an API (Application Program Interface) for browser automation. Selenium is the widely used free and open-source tool used for automation testing of web applications through various browsers and platforms.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Playwright seems to be a lot more popular than Selenium. While we know about 231 links to Playwright, we've tracked only 8 mentions of Selenium. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Playwright mentions (231)

  • Typed E2E test IDs
    We start with a project that was bootstrapped with npx create-next-app. For the E2E test we use Playwright and set it up as described in the testing guide provided by Next.js. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Playwright Scraping infinite loading & pagination
    Playwright is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft, it allows developers to write reliable end-to-end tests and perform browser automation tasks with ease. What sets Playwright apart is its ability to work seamlessly across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit), it provides a consistent and efficient way to interact with web pages, extract data, and automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it supports... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Sometimes things simply don't work
    The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • The best testing strategies for frontends
    With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Playwright Web Scraping 2024 - Tutorial
    In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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Selenium mentions (8)

  • How to write tests in Django for JavaScript fetch
    You won't be able to test the javascript function itself from within python, but you can exercise the front-end code using something like cypress (https://cypress.io) or the older but still respectable selenium (https://selenium.dev). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Having Issues with selenium
    In addition, .find_element_by_class_name is deprecated since selenium 4.3.0 and the replacement is .find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "class"). Check selenium's site for more info. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Issues with Selenium 4.8.0
    This is the code again after checking selenium's official site :. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Having Issues with selenium
    I also tried the following code seen on the selenium.dev website. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Document Object Model Specification
    The following functions are defined within the Selenium project, at revision 1721e627e3b5ab90a06e82df1b088a33a8d11c20. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Playwright and Selenium, you can also consider the following products

puppeteer - Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium...

Cypress.io - Slow, difficult and unreliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Install Cypress in seconds and take the pain out of front-end testing.

Robot framework - Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance...

BrowserCat - Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.

Katalon - Built on the top of Selenium and Appium, Katalon Studio is a free and powerful automated testing tool for web testing, mobile testing, and API testing.

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.