Choose Playwright when you're building a new suite for a modern web app: auto-waiting, trace viewer debugging, parallel workers out of the box, and one API across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit make it the faster path to a stable suite. Choose Selenium when you need its unmatched ecosystem breadth, legacy browser coverage, massive grid infrastructure, or an existing investment your team already maintains well.
Where Playwright wins
- Auto-waiting kills the biggest flake source (Manual waits) by design
- Trace viewer turns 'works on my machine' failures into replayable recordings
- API Testing, network mocking, and storage-state auth are built in, no bolt-ons
Where Selenium still wins
- Grid maturity for very large cross-browser matrices, including older browsers
- Language breadth (Java, C#, Ruby, PHP) when your team isn't a JS/TS shop
- Fifteen years of Stack Overflow answers for every obscure edge case
Our honest default
New suite, modern app, no constraints: Playwright with TypeScript. Existing Selenium suite that's stable: don't rewrite for fashion, invest in stabilization instead. We build and maintain both, and the framework matters far less than the architecture around it: selector contracts, data isolation, and CI discipline.
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