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.

Let’s examine how Selenium approaches an automation task:

// Selenium

import { Builder } from "selenium-webdriver";
import chrome from "selenium-webdriver/chrome";

(async () => {
  // Create new Chrome options
  const options = new chrome.Options();
  
  // Create the WebDriver instance
  const driver = await new Builder()
    .forBrowser("chrome")
    .setChromeOptions(options)
    .build();

  try {
    // Navigate to the website
    await driver.get("https://www.browserbase.com");
    
    // Add any additional automation steps here
    
  } finally {
    // Make sure to quit the driver to clean up resources
    await driver.quit();
  }
})().catch((error) => console.error(error.message));

Selenium is the most verbose and failure-prone - it requires explicit waits and more setup code, reflecting its enterprise-focused architecture and broad compatibility requirements.

Puppeteer

Launched in 2017, Google created Puppeteer as a powerful Node.js library specifically designed for automating and testing Chromium-based browsers. Instead of building a separate driver like Selenium, Puppeteer communicates directly with Chrome DevTools Protocol. This allows for more efficient and streamlined browser control.

While Puppeteer only works with JavaScript and TypeScript, it remains a powerful tool for Chromium-specific automation needs, particularly when deep browser integration is required.

However, Puppeteer has limitations as well. This includes limited browser support primarily focused on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, lacks native mobile app testing features, primarily supports JavaScript limiting language options for developers, and is less suitable for complex end-to-end testing across multiple browsers.

Here's an example of how Puppeteer handles browser automation:

// Puppeteer

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';

(async () => {
  // Launch a browser instance instead of connecting to BrowserBase
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: "new" // Use new headless mode
  });
  
  // Create a new page (pages() might be empty in fresh browser)
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  
  // Navigate to the website
  await page.goto('https://www.browserbase.com');
  
  // Close the page and browser
  await page.close();
  await browser.close();
})().catch((error) => console.error(error.message));

While more streamlined than Selenium, Puppeteer's Chrome-only focus and lack of built-in smart waiting requires more manual handling compared to Playwright, which is mentioned in the next section.

Enter Playwright: The Clear Winner

Microsoft released Playwright in 2020. Since its launch, Playwright has evolved to become a comprehensive automation solution.

Built with a more modern architecture, it works across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers, solving a plethora of issues that arose with other contemporaries like Puppeteer and Selenium.

One of the main benefits of Playwright is its simple syntax with powerful abstractions behind the scenes. This lets users write tests that look like real user actions. These actions happen when using a web application. This means that the code is not only easier to read and understand but also more maintainable over time. Developers can easily understand the purpose of the code. This makes it simpler to work with team members or help new developers join.

Let's go through a code example of how Playwright works:

// Playwright

import { chromium } from 'playwright';

(async () => {
  // Launch the browser instead of connecting to BrowserBase
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  
  // Create a new context (equivalent to an incognito window)
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  
  // Create a new page in the context
  const page = await context.newPage();
  
  // Navigate to the website
  await page.goto('https://browserbase.com/');
  
  // Close the page
  await page.close();
  
  // Close the browser
  await browser.close();
})().catch((error) => console.error(error.message));

As you can see, the playwright code is more straightforward than any other framework.

These actions happen when using a web application. This means that the code is not only easier to read and understand but also more maintainable over time. Not only do developers easily understand the purpose of the code, this makes it simpler to work with team members or help new developers join.

Browserbase can also serve as a direct substitute for this, enabling you to execute sessions concurrently and perform real-time debugging. This adds more control while being able to have the same functionality as Playwright

Introducing Stagehand: The AI-Powered Successor to Playwright

Given that Playwright it the most ideal and upcoming framework, Stagehand (stagehand.dev) is the easiest way to build browser automations. You can turn your Playwright code into Stagehand with one line. It is completely interoperable with Playwright and has seamless integration with Browserbase.

Anything that can be done in a browser can be done with Stagehand. Think about tasks like:

1. Log into Amazon, search for AirPods, and buy the most relevant product

2. Go to Hacker News and extract the top stories of the day

3. Go to ESPN, search for Steph Curry, and get stats for his last 10 games

Stagehand offers three simple AI APIs (act, extract, and observe) on top of the base Playwright Page class that provide the building blocks for web automation via natural language. It also makes Playwright more accessible to non-technical users and less vulnerable to minor changes in the UI/DOM.

Stagehand, especially when combined with Browserbase's stealth mode, makes it easier to write durable, performant code that can bypass bot detection and captchas.

Stagehand in Action

As you can see, the Playwright code is more straightforward than any other framework. The code demonstrates why Selenium is more verbose - it requires explicit waits and more setup code, reflecting its enterprise-focused architecture and broad compatibility requirements. While Puppeteer offers powerful Chrome-specific features, it requires more explicit waiting patterns and additional boilerplate compared to Playwright.

Start using Stagehand today

If you have Node.js installed, you can easily create a new Stagehand app with baked-in best practices with the following command:

npx create-browser-app --example quickstart