Selenium
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy if you have engineers to write and maintain browser test suites at scale . it's the free industry standard.
Comparison
Selenium vs Playwright
Selenium lands on Depends, and Playwright lands on Worth it.
Playwright
Worth it
Confidence: Medium
Buy if your team writes code: Playwright is free, open source, and repeatedly cited as the default modern E2E testing framework.
| Compare | Selenium | Playwright |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Worth it |
| Best for | QA teams with coding skills | Dev teams shipping web apps |
| Who it's not for | Teams without engineers . tests are code and break constantly | Teams with zero developers |
| Privacy | Multiple public CVEs, mostly Selenium Grid; a critical flaw in an old Docker hub image and in-the-wild cryptomining abuse of exposed Grids.⁸ | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.14 |
| Support quality | Community and sponsorship only; no vendor support | No support evidence in sources |
| Public sentiment | Users value its free flexibility but consistently flag coding demands, brittle tests, and heavy maintenance.³ | Third-party reviewers consistently describe Playwright as fast, reliable, and increasingly the default E2E framework, though direct user quotes are scarce.15 |
| Biggest gotcha | Free tool, expensive operation: you pay for Grid hosting, CI infrastructure, and engineers' time.⁵ | Framework is free, but scaled parallel runs route through Azure's pay-as-you-go Playwright Testing service.16 |
Pick Selenium when
- QA teams with coding skills
- Cross-browser regression suites
- Distributed testing via Grid
- Automating repetitive web admin tasks
When Selenium is not a fit
- Teams without engineers . tests are code and break constantly
- Small startups wanting quick automation; use Playwright or Cypress
- Buyers needing vendor support or SLAs; there is no company to call
- Anyone unwilling to self-host and secure a Grid
Pick Playwright when
- Dev teams shipping web apps
- QA engineers automating browsers
- CI/CD pipelines
- Teams testing apps and AI agents
When Playwright is not a fit
- Teams with zero developers
- No-code buyers wanting record-and-playback only
- Manual testers who won't maintain code
- Buyers needing vendor-SLA support on the free tier
Sources
- Selenium official siteselenium.devofficial
official
review
review
news
- Playwright vs Selenium 2026: The $216K Maintenance Taxgetautonoma.comnews
security
- CVE-2022-28109 . Selenium Grid 4.0.0 (NVD)nvd.nist.govsecurity
security
news
- Companies that use Selenium (84,379) . TheirStacktheirstack.comnews
- Playwright official siteplaywright.devofficial
- Playwright release notesplaywright.devofficial
- Playwright security pageplaywright.devsecurity
review
- Announcing Microsoft Playwright Testingazure.microsoft.comnews