Choosing between Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium? We recommend Playwright
In web automation and testing, three tools tend to lead the field: Playwright, Puppeteer, and Selenium. Each tool has its own features and benefits. However, for the most powerful and reliable option, Playwright is the best of the three. At Browserbase, we support all three frameworks. We have seen why developers and teams often choose Playwright for modern automation. In this article, we will break down the key differences and explain why Playwright reigns supreme. We'll also check out Browserbase's new open-source library called Stagehand: the robust, AI-powered successor to Playwright.
Choosing Your Browser Automation Tool
What to Look for in 2025
Before finding out what tools are out in the market, it’s important to know what to look for. Some of these features that developers often as for are listed below:
- Setup and initialization process is streamlined, requiring minimal configuration compared to other frameworks.
- Chrome execution is highly reliable due to direct integration with Chrome DevTools Protocol.
- The framework provides debugging capabilities through modern tools.
- Documentation is comprehensive, with guides, API references, and practical examples that help developers get started quickly.
Understanding Your Options
Let's go through three of the most common frameworks being used as we examine their strengths, limitations, and use cases in modern web automation.
Selenium
Jason Huggins at ThoughtWorks created Selenium in 2004 (the oldest of the three frameworks). It changed web automation as one of the first complete testing frameworks. It has evolved through multiple versions, with Selenium WebDriver becoming the industry standard. Selenium works with many popular programming languages like Java, Python, C#, Ruby, and JavaScript. This flexibility lets development teams use their preferred languages.
Selenium's architecture consists of the WebDriver for browser-specific automation bindings, Grid for distributed testing, and IDE for record-and-playback functionality. Unlike other tools, it needs different browser-specific drivers (ChromeDriver for Chrome and GeckoDriver for Firefox) to function. While Selenium offers support, its architecture introduces complexity and performance overhead compared to modern alternatives.
Selenium does have some major weaknesses, which includes slower execution speed compared to Playwright and Puppeteer in performance tests, more complex setup and configuration required, lacks advanced features like Playwright's custom selector engines, and does not have deep integration with Chrome's DevTools like Puppeteer.