It’s nearly 2026. The "Holy Trinity" of browser automation is still fighting for dominance in your tech stack.
If you’re starting a new project today, which one actually deserves your time? Let’s do a fast, brutally honest breakdown.
Selenium: The "OG"
The industry veteran defining automation since 2004. It’s reliable, universal, but showing its age.
✅ The Good:
• Universal: Supports nearly every browser (even IE) and language (Java, Python, C#, JS, Ruby).
• Community: Two decades of StackOverflow answers cover every possible edge case.
❌ The Bad:
• WebDriver Hell: Managing separate driver versions for every browser update is a maintenance nightmare.
• Flakiness: Its architecture is slower and notoriously prone to flaky tests.
Puppeteer: The Chrome Specialist
Google's answer. It bypasses WebDriver to speak directly to Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP).
✅ The Good:
• Speed: Without the WebDriver middleman, it is blazing fast.
• DevTools Power: Incredible network interception and performance analysis capabilities.
❌ The Bad:
• The "Chrome" Lock: It’s meant for Chromium browsers. No native Safari (WebKit) or Firefox support.
• JS/TS Only: It’s a Node library.
Playwright: The Modern Standard
Microsoft’s contender designed to fix the flaws of its predecessors.
✅ The Good:
• Auto-Waits: The killer feature. Playwright automatically waits for elements to be actionable before clicking. This kills flakiness.
• True Cross-Browser: Runs on Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari) with one unified API.
• Elite Tooling: The Trace Viewer (time-travel debugging) and Codegen are best-in-class.
❌ The Bad:
• Younger Ecosystem: The community is exploding, but it doesn't have Selenium's 20-year backlog of plugins.
The 2025 Verdict
For any greenfield project in 2025, the choice is Playwright.
It solved the biggest pain point of automation (flakiness via auto-waits) and supports multiple languages (Python, Java, JS, .NET).
• Only stick with Selenium for legacy enterprise suites needing IE support.
• Only stick with Puppeteer for niche Chrome-scraping tasks.
What are you running in your pipelines next year? Let me know!
Top comments (5)
for greenfield in 2025/2026, Playwright is the no‑brainer-it’s truly cross‑browser, kills a ton of flake with auto‑waits, ships slick traces, and scales hard with minimal fuss. Grab Selenium when you’re stuck with old‑school IE/legacy, vendor/device grids, strict Java‑only stacks with must‑have plugins, or audit‑heavy enterprise integrations. Puppeteer shines for Chrome/Chromium‑only scraping or perf work where you want day‑one CDP toys and a tiny Node footprint. At CI scale, Playwright spins up faster and parallelizes cleaner than Selenium Grid. Bottom line: go Playwright unless legacy handcuffs or deep Chrome‑only CDP needs say otherwise.
Hi, nice overview.
I've been doing e2e tests for 5+ years.
I evaluated e2e test solutions exactly a year ago.
Playwright does NOT support Safari! It does support running a WebKit based minimal browser on the platform it runs. But it is not the same as running Safari on macOS, iOS or iPadOS. This is just a marketing trick. I have to deal with bugs specific to iPadOS Safari.
Selenium does not support any mobile devices running Safari.
The only automation solution I found, that lets us run tests on I-Devices ist Appium.
The node.js implementation of an Appium Client is WebdriverIO.
Good overview - for people using Laravel, I can emphatically recommend Dusk - by default it uses ChromeDriver, and it is (when running in that mode) blazingly fast - but optionally it can work via Selenium to drive other browsers than Chrome ...
But where it shines is in its ability to directly setup and prepare all of the backend stuff (database etc) which your tests need - which is possible because Dusk is programmed in PHP, and can utilize all of the Laravel goodies!
That's really a killer feature of Dusk - you won't believe how powerful that is until you've used it ...
I have not heard of this one before, I will taking a look at this! thank you!
Dusk is part of Laravel - if you're a Laravel programmer, chances are you've heard about Dusk - if you're not a Laravel programmer, you've likely never heard of it!
P.S. at some point we weren't satisfied with Dusk, but that was down to 2 things:
1) It was slow, at least on some developers' machines - but that was because we were running it with the "wrong" ChromeDriver - when we fixed that, our tests really flew, they were blazingly fast ...
2) We were trying to use Browser Testing in a way that wasn't productive for us, and which made it a chore - we tried to browser-test EVERYTHING and the kitchen sink, and that's just "busy work", and a waste of time - we then switched to an approach where, when we implemented a "ticket" (fixed a bug or implemented a feature), and it was a frontend (JS) code dependent feature, we added a Dusk test specifically testing that specific feature - "locking down" that exact piece of 'behavior' ... and that approach just made sense, and worked wonders :-)
Before finding out these two points "ad 1" and "ad 2", we briefly triaged Cypress, but we found out that it was not the solution for us - and that's mainly because, in our organization, test automation isn't used by QA people (QA engineers or testers), but by developers - and that, in turn, made Dusk a much more suitable browser test tool than Cypress :-)
(Dusk wouldn't really have been suitable or easily usable for our QA people, but it was very suitable for our developers - in particular because our devs already program in PHP, alongside JS, but even more because Dusk makes it possible to directly control and set up/prepare the backend for your browser tests - which is extremely powerful ...)