Playwright vs Selenium

In the ever-evolving landscape of web automation and testing, two names consistently stand out: Playwright and Selenium. Whether you're an experienced developer or just starting your journey in web automation, understanding the differences between these tools can be crucial.

In this article, we'll dive into the Playwright vs Selenium comparison. We'll explore their key features, performance, and suitability for various tasks like web scraping and test automation. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of which tool is best suited for your browser automation tasks.

Overview of Playwright and Selenium

When it comes to Playwright vs Selenium, both tools have established themselves as leaders in the browser automation space. However, they cater to different needs and come with their unique strengths.

Selenium

Selenium has been the go-to tool for web automation and testing for over a decade. Because of its length, it has developed a sizable community and a lot of resources, making it a reliable choice for many developers.

Selenium supports multiple programming languages, including Java, Python, C#, and JavaScript, allowing flexibility in integration with various projects. Its compatibility with numerous browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, ensures comprehensive testing across different environments.

Playwright

On the other hand, Playwright is a relatively newer entrant developed by Microsoft. Designed to address some of the limitations of Selenium, Playwright offers a modern approach to web automation.

Playwright inherently supports multiple browsers and comes with built-in modern browser automation features like device contexts, auto-waiting, and network interception. It also provides full support for asynchronous operations, making it faster and more efficient for handling dynamic web elements.

In short, Selenium has a mature ecosystem with extensive community support, making it ideal for large-scale automation projects. Playwright, on the other hand, is faster and more optimized for modern web applications, offering advanced features like request interception and better developer experience.

For more, let's compare their key features and differences to see how they stack up against each other.

Key Features and Differences

When comparing Selenium vs Playwright, several key features set them apart. Below is a comprehensive table highlighting these differences:

Language and Browser Support

Both Playwright vs Selenium offer extensive language and browser support, making them highly scalable for a variety of projects. Here's a breakdown:

Language Support:

Both Selenium and Playwright have bindings for major programming languages:

Selenium:

• Java
• Python
• C#
• Ruby
• JavaScript (Node.js)
• Kotlin

Playwright:

• TypeScript
• JavaScript (Node.js)
• Python
• C#
• Java

However, Playwright uses JavaScript as its primary language and binds other languages through a translation layer which can make it difficult to hack on and improve for fingerprint fortification patches.

Selenium, on the other hand, supports a broader range of languages directly, making it easier to extend and integrate with different projects.

Browser Support:

Both Selenium and Playwright primarily target the Chrome web browser with other browsers having varying levels of support:

• Selenium supports a broader range of browsers, including Opera and older versions of browsers, which makes it suitable for legacy systems.
• Playwright ensures deeper integration with Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, offering a more modern and streamlined approach to browser automation.

Performance and Speed

In the Playwright vs Selenium debate, performance can be a crucial factor. Faster tools lead to quicker test execution, better scalability, and improved efficiency, which are critical for large projects or frequent runs.

Playwright generally outperforms Selenium due to its modern architecture, which supports asynchronous operations for faster execution. Selenium, while powerful and widely used, can be slower because of its older design and reliance on browser-specific drivers.

Example: Playwright (Faster with Async)

import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async def run():
    async with async_playwright() as p:
        browser = await p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        page1 = await browser.new_page()
        page2 = await browser.new_page()

        # Scraping multiple pages concurrently
        await asyncio.gather(
            page1.goto("https://example.com"),
            page2.goto("https://news.ycombinator.com")
        )

        # Extract content
        content1, content2 = await page1.content()
        content2 = await page2.content()

        print("Page 1 content length:", len(content1))
        print("Page 2 content length:", len(content2))

        await browser.close()

asyncio.run(run())

Using asynchronous operations we can spawn multiple browser tabs and while one tab is waiting for a response the other one can take over the processing thread.
This allows to perform more tasks concurrently and speed up the overall execution time in some use cases lik web scraping.

Example: Selenium (Slower Sequential Execution)

On the other hand, Selenium only offers synchronous operations:

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Scraping sequentially
driver.get("https://example.com")
content1 = driver.page_source
print("Page 1 content length:", len(content1))

driver.get("https://news.ycombinator.com")
content2 = driver.page_source
print("Page 2 content length:", len(content2))

driver.quit()

While Selenium benefits from a large community and various plugins, Playwright's async support provides a noticeable speed advantage, making it a better option for modern web applications.

Capabilities and User Experience (UX)

In the domain of Playwright compared Selenium, Playwright takes the lead with its advanced capabilities and modern user experience.

Playwright supports asynchronous operations seamlessly, allowing for more efficient scripting and better handling of dynamic web elements. Selenium, while powerful, requires more manual handling of asynchronous events, which can complicate test scripts and increase the potential for errors.

Here’s an example where of a basic Playwright script with modern API design:

import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async def run():
    async with async_playwright() as p:
        browser = await p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        page = await browser.new_page()

        # Navigate to a page and wait for dynamic content
        await page.goto("https://example.com")

        # Wait for a dynamic element to appear
        await page.wait_for_selector("#dynamic-content")

        # Interact with the dynamic element
        await page.click("#dynamic-content")

        print("Dynamic element handled successfully")
        await browser.close()

asyncio.run(run())

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

# Set up the headless browser
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")

# Replace with the path to your chromedriver executable if needed
service = Service("path/to/chromedriver")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service, options=chrome_options)

# Navigate to the page
driver.get("https://example.com")

# Wait for the dynamic element to appear
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
dynamic_element = wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "#dynamic-content")))

# Interact with the dynamic element
dynamic_element.click()

print("Dynamic element handled successfully")
driver.quit()

In this example, Playwright automatically waits for the dynamic element (#dynamic-content) to appear on the page before interacting with it. This kind of asynchronous handling is built into Playwright's architecture, simplifying interaction with dynamic content and reducing the need for complex wait logic that’s often required in Selenium.

Differences in Testing

When evaluating Playwright vs Selenium for testing purposes, Playwright is frequently the preferred choice.

Playwright's built-in features, such as auto-waiting and robust handling of modern web frameworks, device context configuration make it more adept at managing complex and varied testing scenarios like testing the latest web application framework on mobile devices.

Playwright's ability to intercept network requests and handle multiple browser contexts simultaneously provides a more comprehensive testing environment. Selenium, while capable, may require additional configurations and third-party tools to match Playwright's out-of-the-box functionalities.

Differences in Web Scraping

Web scraping is another area where Selenium versus Playwright showcases distinct differences.

Selenium has long been favored for web scraping tasks due to its mature ecosystem and extensive community support. It offers reliable solutions for bypassing scraping blocks, especially with tools like improved ChromeDriver.

Example with Selenium:

Using Undetected ChromeDriver in Selenium, you can bypass detection mechanisms commonly found on websites like e-commerce or social media platforms. Here's an example of scraping a page with Selenium in Python:

from selenium import webdriver
from undetected_chromedriver.v2 import Chrome, ChromeOptions

# Set up undetected ChromeDriver
options = ChromeOptions()
options.headless = True
driver = Chrome(options=options)

# Open a website
driver.get('https://example.com')

# Extract data
title = driver.find_element_by_tag_name('h1').text
print(f"Page Title: {title}")

driver.quit()

In this case, Selenium allows you to scrape content while bypassing bot detection. Undetected ChromeDriver helps make the browser look more human-like, preventing anti-scraping systems from blocking your requests.

However, Playwright is rapidly gaining traction in this domain due to its modern architecture and superior developer experience. Playwright handles dynamic content more efficiently, especially for websites built with JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular.

You can learn more about Web Scraping Without Blocking With Undetected ChromeDriver in our dedicated article:

Web Scraping Without Blocking With Undetected ChromeDriver

Learn how how to use Undetected ChromeDriver to avoid web scraping blocking.

Here’s an example where Playwright intercepts API requests while scraping:

Playwright's ability to handle SPAs (single-page applications) makes it ideal for scraping sites like Twitter, where content is loaded dynamically:

import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async def run():
    async with async_playwright() as p:
        browser = await p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        page = await browser.new_page()

        # Intercepting XHR/Fetch requests
        page.on("request", lambda request: print(f"Request: {request.url}"))
        page.on("response", lambda response: print(f"Response: {response.url} - {response.status}"))

        # Navigate to the website
        await page.goto('https://example.com')

        await browser.close()

asyncio.run(run())

In this example, Playwright intercepts every network request and response, providing full visibility into the site's background API interactions. This kind of request interception can be highly beneficial for web scraping, API analysis, or even debugging network-related issues in web apps. Selenium, on the other hand, can only achieve this via third-party libraries like Selenium-wire.

For a deeper dive into how to capture network requests in Playwright, check out our article on How to Capture XHR Requests in Playwright.

Scaling Automated Tasks

When it comes to scaling automated tasks, both Playwright vs Selenium offer distinct approaches.

Selenium has a more established ecosystem for scaling, thanks to Selenium Grid, which allows for distributed test execution across multiple machines. This means you can run large-scale automation projects across many browsers and operating systems simultaneously, significantly reducing test run times.

However, Playwright presents a different kind of scalability. For smaller programs or tasks, Playwright's support for asynchronous operations makes it easier to scale within a single thread. Since most page interactions involve waiting for elements to load or appear, running multiple browser instances asynchronously can make the execution much faster without requiring complex infrastructure like Selenium Grid. Here's an example demonstrating Playwright's async scalability:

import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright

async def scrape_page(url):
    async with async_playwright() as p:
        browser = await p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        page = await browser.new_page()
        await page.goto(url)
        content = await page.content()
        await browser.close()
        return content

# Scrape multiple pages concurrently
async def main():
    urls = ['https://example.com', 'https://news.ycombinator.com', 'https://github.com']
    tasks = [scrape_page(url) for url in urls]
    results = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
    for i, result in enumerate(results):
        print(f"Page {i+1} content length: {len(result)}")

asyncio.run(main())

In this example, Playwright scrapes multiple pages concurrently using Python’s asyncio library, achieving efficient scaling without the need for additional infrastructure. This makes it ideal for smaller tasks where running several concurrent actions within one machine is sufficient.

For more detailed insights into scaling with Selenium, check out our dedicated article:

Intro to Web Scraping Using Selenium Grid

Learn how to use Selenium Grid Python to scrape at scaleو managing browser instances and concurrent web scraping.

FAQ

To wrap up this guide, let's have a look at some frequently asked questions about selenium compared to playwright.

Which tool is faster: Playwright or Selenium?

In most cases, Playwright is faster than Selenium due to its modern architecture and optimized handling of asynchronous operations. Playwright also has better out-of-the-box support for headless browsers, contributing to its superior performance. However, Selenium’s speed can be improved using tools like Selenium Grid for parallel execution.

Can I use Playwright and Selenium together in the same project?

While technically possible, it's generally recommended to choose one tool to maintain consistency and avoid potential conflicts. Both tools serve similar purposes but have different architectures and workflows.

Is Selenium still relevant in 2024?

Absolutely. Selenium remains a powerful and widely-used tool for web automation and testing. Its extensive community and vast array of integrations ensure its continued relevance.

Conclusion

When it comes to Selenium vs Playwright, the best choice depends on your project’s specific requirements. Here’s a quick summary to help guide your decision:

• Selenium has a mature ecosystem with extensive community support and broad language support, including Java, Python, C#, and more.
• Selenium is ideal for large-scale automation with tools like Selenium Grid and integrates well with legacy systems.
• Playwright offers faster performance and is optimized for modern web applications.
• Playwright provides excellent support for asynchronous operations and built-in features like request interception.
• Playwright delivers a better developer experience, especially for handling SPAs and dynamic content.

Both tools continue to evolve and adapt to the changing web landscape. Understanding their strengths and differences will help you choose the tool that best aligns with your automation and testing goals.