Compare brief · Migration decision
Playwright vs Selenium
Playwright vs Selenium is the dominant 2026 migration decision. Selenium is the safer polyglot baseline; Playwright is the faster JavaScript runner.
Direct answer
open-source
Playwright
composite: 88 · pricing: public
Surged past Selenium in 2026 developer adoption (~45% vs ~22%); 33M weekly npm downloads; component-testing now GA; VS Code Playwright Test extension partnership with BrowserStack (Sep 2025).
Open the Playwright brief →open-source
Selenium
composite: 64 · pricing: public
Selenium 4.x stable; Selenium Manager handles driver provisioning automatically; adoption share continues to slip vs Playwright in 2026 dev surveys.
Open the Selenium brief →Pick A when
Pick Playwright when
JavaScript-only test estate, greenfield project, team comfortable with code-first authoring.
Pick B when
Pick Selenium when
Polyglot test estate, large existing Selenium investment, organisations with Java/C# QA teams.
Cost
How the cost picture differs
Both are free under Apache 2.0; the cost difference is engineer hours. Our TCO model applies a 1.0x multiplier to Playwright and a 1.6x multiplier to Selenium engineer hours.
Open the 3-year TCO calculator →Caveats
Things this compare cannot answer
- Selenium 4 with Selenium Manager removed most driver-provisioning pain.
- Migrations are not always worth doing; the /q/migration-cost-selenium-to-playwright page has the ledger.