Playwright vs Selenium: Comparing Reliability and Speed in Web Automation

Reliability

Playwright:

• Cross-browser Testing: Playwright is more reliable due to a more conventional design that is compatible with Chromium Firefox and WebKit among other browsers. Maintaining organizational cultural consistency in all types of settings.
• Network Interception and Mocking: In this regard, trustworthiness Playwright outperforms because it has interception and the mocking of network requests which aid in the testing of the web, as well as API interactions.
• Auto-waiting: Playwright ensures elements are expected to be available before acting on them which eliminates many issues such as element visibility or rendering and many more.

Selenium:

• Cross-browser Testing: Selenium also supports many browsers but sometimes you may need to do some additional settings.
• Network Interception and Mocking: Unfortunately, Selenium does not have its tools or features for this feature, and therefore, it requires third-party tools.
• Flakiness: Flakiness might be rife in Selenium tests, this is due to the fact that Selenium relies on WebDriver and the implementations might differ depending on the specific browsers.

Speed

Playwright:

• Parallel Execution: There is the concept of parallel testing in Playwright, which is much easier and faster in terms of testing.
• Headless Mode: It is worth noting that Playwright aims at headless mode and its performance hence it can lead to better performance when compared to Selenium.
• Modern APIs: Playwright comes with high-level, modern interaction APIs that can result in faster and more slender scripts.

Selenium:

• Parallel Execution: It is also possible to achieve test parallelism with Selenium Grid but its setup and configuration are relatively more complex than all the integrated features of the playwright.
• Execution Speed: Finally, because Selenium employs WebDriver protocol, communication between the browser and the script is more frequent and that might slow down the script’s performance compared to other tools.
• Headless Mode: From the perspective of headless browser execution – there are probably not as many benefits as with Playwright.

Summary and Final Thoughts

Using the features of both Playwright and Selenium, solid and effective testing can be achieved. Playwright with PyTest has relatively sophisticated browser automation capabilities and high speed, so it is perfect for today’s web applications. On the other hand, PyTest + Selenium supports different kinds of browsers and has a rather rich ecosystem, thus, it can be considered as a quite stable tool for covering all important aspects of the application. With the knowledge of the major and minor strengths of each combination, one will be able to construct a robust and efficient automation suite based on the need.