🎭 Playwright vs ✅ Selenium | Browser Automation 2021 Showdown

In this episode, we draw the line: mature and experienced vs. young and energetic? Which is the automation tool of choice: 🎭 Playwright or ✅ Selenium? With my trusty scale ⚖️, we'll weigh some of the key features of these two: browser support, languages, web interactions, speed, community, waiting and so on.

Who's gonna win? Could be Selenium, or maybe Playwright? Test Automation or automated testing? Nobody knows 👀 ...


Other mentioned links

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:41 Playwright in 30 seconds
01:17 Official browser support
02:05 Language Bindings
02:40 Basic Web Interactions
04:48 Speed
06:03 Speed: Starting the browser
07:58 Waiting
10:37 Community Support
11:41 Playwright native
13:06 Outro

[Sheriour]

I'm very happy to have found your channel and very sad to see there isn't much activity here anymore. I think you have a very unique style of delivery, equally informative and entertaining, which is not something easy to find. Very good video 👍

[terencetcf]

having used both in real world projects for the past few years... once you get used to Playwright, there is almost like no going back. Is so much cleaner and easier to work with.

[milan_clips]

I humbly request you to please keep posting more of such content and I really loved your presentation style. Keep up the good work.

[naveenautomationlabs]

Awesome video @victor. Great comparison, very well presented. For me Selenium is still my first love for web automation.

[fabiel]

I see more potential on Playwright in my opinion keep up with them uploads it helps a lot for new devs like me, great video man.

[SongforTin]

Hey this video was so much fun to watch. Hope you will produce more videos, you're a great teacher.

[dand]

Interesting review, i might differ on a few points mentioned... I've been a software developer/tester for 30years, if my life depended on stability and reliability hands down Playright is the winner. Often selenium, especially with newer javascript libraries, angular, react, vue, svelte and others, good luck getting selenium to be reliable. Go back 10 years ago, selenium was fine, but no longer with the virtual Dom... For this reason Playwright, especially with their switch to locators and discouraging ElementHandle, would assert really makes Selenium obsolete. And to be fair, your review was before this, might assert the switch in Playwright was a month or three after your review came out. Can't help thinking of how many "StaleElementExceptions" i get or need retry logic in selenium tests, not so with Playwright.

[sv]

Absolutely great explain and show up! 👍 Feeling like i read good article ❤

[DanielIonutMihalache]

I recently ran into a drag and drop issue with selenium when you want to drag an element from a frame to another frame. Actions class simply doesn`t do the job.
I then tried playwright which just worked right away. Big plus for playwright

[pavlohernandez]

Information: 10tone of voice, speed, gestures: perfect. new subscriber

[Ish-YouTube]

I really like the fact that IE support weights more than auto-wait support.
there are so much more to compare, and this video need some corrections also.

1. Playwright is way faster than shown here.
2. didn't mention the fact that Playwright uses WebSocket to communicate with the Browser.
3. Playwright supports API testing, Visual testing, network control (intercept, mock, etc) and more
4. did mention Videos but didn't mention built in reporters and trace.
there is so much to say, but YouTube comments aren't the place.

[andreasvanbergen]

Maestro! Thank you so much for this video! For my current assignment I am looking for the best candidate regarding automated testing tools....this video helps me alot! Thanks! 👍

[prabhic]

Thanks you for very much, very nice to quickly grasp, playwright, having known selenium.

[ivopdimitrov]

I want to mention that most of the Selenium based frameworks are having really nice features and additions to Selenium library. So working with such framework is making your automation testing efforts easier. So guys please do not only look at Selenium disadvantages or missing features. Most of them are handled in automation frameworks.

[nmstoker]

Excellent video - thanks Victor! I liked that you weigh things up fairly, with just the right amount of detail, and highlight how any choice about which is "better" ultimately has to be up to the viewer (/user)

[letcode]

Playwright is awesome with its test runner.
We can do lots of things, visual comparison. Reports with screenshot and video out of the box, and lot of more features.
The locator strategy which is huge comparing to selenium.

[andre-le-bone-aparte]

Just found your channel. Excellent Content - Another sub for you sir!

[Yoyo-gfoi]

As a user of both Selenium and Playwright at work, I must say Playwright is far superior, much faster, better documentation, and a lot less flaky. Once the Playwright community grows, it will become the industry standard without a doubt.

[NoahElRhandour]

this was very educational, thank you so so much for the knowledge and all the effort that was necessary to produce such a video

[ciprianreghina]

Great comparison and thanks for the video. Two corrections: First, Selenium also supports PHP language and second, the analogy with Chrome Incognito windows is not precise, since all incognito windows are sharing the same session (between them). Opening a new Incognito window while you are logged in into another incognito window will keep you authenticated. Thanks !