Playwright vs. Selenium in 2024: In-Depth Comparison

Struggling to choose between Playwright and Selenium for your web scraping or test automation project? You're not alone. As two of the most popular open-source automation tools, deciding between Playwright vs. Selenium can be a confusing task.

Before deciding, it's essential to consider your scraping needs and criteria, like language compatibility, documentation, simplicity, debugging capability, and browser support. 

This Playwright vs. Selenium article breaks down the differences between both tools so you can make an informed choice for your project.

What Is Playwright?

Playwright is an open-source end-to-end browser automation library for testing and web scraping. If your scraper requires mimicking different environments, you can emulate Playwright to use various platforms, such as Windows, Linux, or macOS.

One of its interesting features is its Codegen, an interactive command-line tool for developing test cases or generating basic locators for your scraper. It also supports browser download via the terminal.

Here's a basic Python Playwright script to scrape the full-page HTML of the E-commerce Challenge page:

# pip install playwright
# playwright install
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

# start playwright in synchronous mode
with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    # launch the browser in headless mode
    browser = playwright.chromium.launch(headless=True)

    # start a new browser page
    page = browser.new_page()

    # open the target website
    page.goto("https://www.scrapingcourse.com/ecommerce/")

    # print the page HTML content
    print(page.content())

    # close the page and exit the browser instance
    page.close()
    browser.close()

Read our complete guide on web scraping with Playwright for more.

👍 Pros

• A Codegen feature to create basic locators.
• Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.
• It supports browser download via the command line.
• Support for resource-blocking.
• It offers fine-grained support over the DevTools and Debugging protocols.
• Support for auto-wait to allow elements to load before scraping.
• It supports multiple browser contexts.
• Easier to use than Selenium.

👍 Cons

• It can only handle device emulation and not real devices.
• Compared to Selenium, Playwright has lower community support.
• It doesn't work with legacy browsers and devices.

What Is Selenium?

Selenium is one of the most popular browser automation libraries for software testing and web scraping. It has a grid feature to run parallel scraping or test automation tasks across multiple real machines like mobile devices.

Like Playwright's Codegen feature, Selenium offers an IDE feature, a browser extension for recording tests over Chrome or Firefox. In addition to recording tests, you can leverage this feature during web scraping to generate locators for target elements without writing code.

See an example Selenium scraper script implemented in Python below:

# pip3 install selenium webdriver-manager
from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service

# setup Chrome WebDriver using WebDriverManager
service = Service(ChromeDriverManager().install())

# instantiate a Chrome options object
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

# set the options to use Chrome in headless mode
options.add_argument("--headless=new")

# initialize an instance of the ChromeDriver in headless mode
driver = webdriver.Chrome(
    service=service,
    options=options,
)

# visit your target site
driver.get("https://www.scrapingcourse.com/ecommerce")

# print the page content
print(driver.page_source)

# close the browser instance
driver.close()

Check out our article on Selenium web scraping with Python to learn more.

👍 Pros

• It has Selenium IDE to generate element locators and record tests.
• Support for real device automation.
• It offers better community support than Playwright.
• Broad cross-browser and platform support.
• It covers more programming languages than Playwright.
• Legacy browser support.
• Built-in grid support for parallel execution over multiple machines. 

👍 Cons

• It offers less control over browser internals.
• Steeper learning curve than Playwright.
• No built-in support for browser contexts.
• Limited support for resource blocking.

Playwright vs. Selenium: Which Is Best?

Playwright and Selenium share some features, such as running headless and non-headless modes, executing JavaScript, and automating user interactions on a browser. Your choice depends on your project needs. 

Go for Playwright if you want simplicity and more fine-grained internal control over the browser. Playwright is an excellent choice if your scraping task requires advanced capabilities, such as blocking resources, handling modern AJAX rendering, intercepting networks, tweaking browser properties, etc.

Choose Selenium if you need extended support for legacy browsers and older devices or want to execute your automation tasks on real devices. If you want your scraper to mimic different devices in parallel, Selenium Grid's cloud support makes the process highly scalable.

Let's now take a closer look at both libraries through a quick comparison in the table below.

Keep reading to see how both libraries compare in detail.

Feature Comparison: Playwright vs. Selenium

Let's now compare the features and capabilities of Playwright and Selenium in more detail.

Selenium Is Compatible With More Languages

Selenium supports more programming languages than Playwright. The library is particularly suitable if you use Kotlin, Java, C#, Perl, Ruby, .NET, Python, JavaScript, or PHP.

While Playwright also supports some major programming languages, it doesn't cover as much ground as Selenium. It's compatible with Python, Java, .NET, TypeScript, and JavaScript.

Selenium Supports More Browsers

Selenium supports more browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and legacy browsers like Internet Explorer.

Playwright drifts towards modern browser technologies with support for native protocols such as the Chrome DevTools Protocol. It supports major browser engines, including Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko (Firefox), but doesn't cover legacy browsers like Internet Explorer.

Playwright Is Easier to Use

Playwright has more straightforward and unified API methods across all browsers, making it easier for beginners. Its method allows for shorter code lines and more readable scripts. Playwright also has default support for new browser features, allowing you to automate advanced automation tasks easily.

Selenium often requires extra coding steps or configurations for advanced tasks, such as request blocking, device emulation, and auto-waiting. Playwright's page API lets you handle these tasks in a straightforward way.

Playwright Is Faster than Selenium

To compare the speed of Selenium and Playwright, we ran a 100-iteration benchmark on both libraries on a machine with 16GB RAM and 2.6 GHz processor speed using the same target website. We then used Python's time module to record the execution time for all iterations and estimated the mean time value using Python's mean module.

After execution, Playwright was faster at 290.37 milliseconds, while Selenium trails behind with an execution time of 536.34 milliseconds.

Once we got the mean execution time for each tool, we presented the result on the graph below (from the fastest to the slowest):

While the above result shows that Playwright is faster than Selenium, it's insufficient to conclude on each tool's speed capability. Factors like network fluctuations, machine memory and hardware differences, and underlying library mechanisms may influence the result.

Consistent execution over multiple runs and environments will provide a more comprehensive speed comparison.

That said, our result provides insight into the relative speed of Playwright and Selenium under the specific conditions of our benchmark.

Selenium Has a More Active Community

While Selenium and Playwright are open-source, Selenium has gained more ground regarding stability, contributions, and community. That's quite understandable because Selenium has been around since 2004, compared to Playwright, which was released in 2020 and is still gaining community traction.

Additionally, 283K GitHub repositories depend on Selenium, while 116K GitHub repositories use Playwright. These statistics show that Selenium is more popular than Playwright among automation testers and web scrapers.

Selenium Can Be Used in Real Devices

Selenium's broad support for the grid system makes direct integration with real devices possible. Using Selenium Grid, you can automate real mobile devices (Android and iOS) and desktop operating systems via cloud services or directly on your local machine.

Playwright doesn't have built-in support for execution on real devices. It relies heavily on browser-based device emulation, which involves screen resizing to implement actions such as touch gestures, smooth scrolling, network throttling, and more.

Playwright Has More Advanced Debugging Capabilities

Playwright has a more robust debugging capability than Selenium. First, Playwright's code generator is built-in, allowing you to debug and generate automation code in supported browsers and languages. 

Selenium IDE aims to offer a similar feature, but it's a browser extension limited to Chrome and Firefox. While you can leverage it as a debugger to determine an element's CSS selector, it doesn't offer the full-scale debugging and coding capability provided by Playwright.

Another powerful feature of Playwright is the built-in ability to record automation session videos. This feature is handy when you want to monitor Playwright's headless execution for debugging purposes. 

Selenium lacks a video recording feature. Although third-party video recording solutions exist for Selenium, they're often technical to integrate.

Neither Tool Helps You Avoid Blocks (And How to Solve It)

Despite being powerful scraping tools, Playwright and Selenium lack the ability to avoid anti-bot detection. Instead, they present bot-like attributes like the WebDriver property and User Agent flags like HeadlessChrome, making them even more prone to getting blocked.

You can avoid anti-bot detection in Playwright by fortifying it with a stealth plugin. There are also patched ChromeDrivers to avoid getting blocked in Selenium. 

Another effort you can make is to modify the User Agent and add premium scraping proxies to avoid IP bans. Unfortunately, all these techniques don't guarantee success at bypassing anti-bots.

An easy way to avoid anti-bot blocks at scale while scraping with an automation tool is via a browser solution such as the ZenRows Scraping Browser.

With a single line of code, the ZenRows Scraping Browser integrates seamlessly with Playwright, adding advanced anti-leak tweaks to avoid anti-bot detection. 

The Scraping Browser automatically handles browser fingerprinting, rotates residential proxy, and more under the hood. It's highly scalable and executes your scraping tasks in the cloud without adding memory overhead to your machine.

Conclusion

In this article, you've seen the difference between Playwright and Selenium. Selenium is an excellent choice if you want a broader community, programming language, and browser support with access to real device automation. However, go with Playwright for its simplicity, speed, and robust debugging feature.

That said, remember that both tools can't avoid anti-bot detection and present scalability challenges. We recommend using ZenRows to bypass all these challenges and scrape any website at scale without limitations.

Try ZenRows for free now without a credit card!