Selenium vs Playwright vs Requests: Which Web Scraping Tool to Use in 2025

After building 50+ web scrapers, here's my honest comparison of the three main tools.

Quick Comparison

Feature	Requests + BS4	Selenium	Playwright
Speed	⚡ Fastest	🐢 Slow	🐇 Medium
JavaScript	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Setup	📦 pip install	🐛 Needs driver	🚀 Single command
Headless	N/A	✅	✅ Native
Anti-bot	❌ Easy to block	⚠️ Can be detected	✅ Better stealth
Learning Curve	📗 Easy	📘 Medium	📘 Medium

When to Use Each

Requests + BeautifulSoup — 70% of Cases

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

r = requests.get('https://example.com')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
data = soup.select('.product-price')

Best for: Simple websites, APIs returning HTML, static content.

Selenium — 20% of Cases

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('https://example.com')
element = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'dynamic-content')

Best for: JavaScript-rendered content, complex interactions, form submissions.

Playwright — 10% of Cases

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('https://example.com')
    content = page.content()