Puppeteer vs Playwright vs Selenium

If you need a browser automation library for web scraping, there are many options to choose from, such as Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright.

While there are many tutorials out there that use Selenium, both Puppeteer and Playwright have been more popular due to being newer, easier to use, and having cooler features. But does that mean that Selenium is not suitable for web scraping anymore? Read further to find out!

This article will compare all three libraries in terms of browser support, language support, features, and concurrency to help you pick the one that fits your exact needs.

What Are the Main Differences Between Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium?

While all the libraries listed automate web browsers in order to test web applications, they were created at different points in time and to solve different issues. Therefore, they have different ways of interacting with a browser.

Selenium was the main web browser automation option for a long while. It uses WebDrivers to control the browser. The project provides WebDrivers for all major browsers. Selenium also maintains a set of official bindings that bring the possibility of using WebDrivers in languages such as C#, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. In addition, there are many unofficial binding libraries for newer languages like Rust.

Puppeteer , a library from the Google team, brought an innovation to the table. Instead of a separate driver, it uses the Chrome DevTools protocol underneath to drive the browser. This eliminates the need for a separate driver. Of course, since Chrome DevTools is only limited to Chrome, support for other browsers was impossible for a while and is currently shaky at best.

Finally, Playwright (initially made by the Puppeteer team that migrated to Microsoft) solved the issues with Puppeteer by updating its architecture to support other browsers. Similarly to Puppeteer, it doesn’t need a driver, but you can also use it with all browsers that are popular at the moment. In addition, it’s currently the tool with the most active development, with the team releasing new features consistently.

Now that you have some extra context, let’s go through all the main differences one by one.

What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium for Browser Automation?

In this section, you’ll learn which of the tools are advantaged in the following four areas: browser support, library support, features, and concurrency.

Browser Support

Selenium supports a wide range of browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera.

Puppeteer was originally developed by Google for Chrome. Therefore, it supports Chromium and Chrome browsers by default. It can be used with non-Chromium browsers with certain configurations.

Playwright supports multiple browsers out of the box, including Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (used by Safari).

Verdict: Selenium and Playwright have better browser support.

Language Support

Selenium provides bindings for various programming languages, including Java, Python, C#, Ruby, and JavaScript. Unofficial bindings for most languages exist, but some of the older open-source libraries are outdated and require a lot of extra work to use.

Puppeteer is primarily designed for use with Node.js, but some community-driven projects exist to provide Puppeteer-like functionality in other languages.

Playwright supports multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and C#.

Verdict: Selenium and Playwright have better language support, with Selenium having a better coverage of less popular and older programming languages.

Features

All these tools have the basic features that are required for web browser automation. You will be able to achieve most of the tasks in any of them - the differences mainly lie in ease of use and speed of implementation.

Playwright, in particular, has many features that make writing web scraping scripts easier for beginners. Playwright Inspector enables you to debug your tests by stepping through lines one by one. You can also use it to generate code by interacting with a web browser. It’s a far cry from no-code web scraping, but it can make it easier to get started with the library.

It also has an auto-waiting feature, which automatically inserts waits after certain interactions with the website. This means that you no longer need to bloat your code with tons of “wait for element x to load” or “wait a second” lines.

Verdict: Puppeteer and Selenium don’t really have any “killer features” over Playwright, so Playwright wins this round.

Concurrency

Concurrency refers to the ability of the library to execute multiple tests in parallel. This can be useful, for example, to scrape many pages at the same time.

Selenium has Selenium Grid , which enables it to manage the execution of tests on multiple devices. This isn’t helpful until you have access to multiple real or virtual devices, but it can be used to quickly scale Selenium-based scraping solutions.

Puppeteer doesn’t have an official cluster management tool such as Selenium Grid. Your best bet to run Puppeteer scripts in parallel is to set up a custom solution or use an open-source solution like puppeteer-cluster .

Playwright provides better support for concurrency than the other two libraries. In fact, Playwright tests run in parallel by default . If you need to run tests on a bigger scale than your own machine, you can use sharding to distribute them among multiple machines.

Verdict: Playwright has the best concurrency capabilities out of the three libraries, with Selenium coming in close second. Puppeteer is not very well suited for concurrent solutions out of the box, but can be used with a bit of a hassle.

Which Library Offers Better Cross-Browser Support: Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium?

Between the three libraries, Selenium offers the best cross-browser support. In addition to all the browsers supported by Puppeteer (Chrome) and Playwright (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit), it supports less common browsers such as Opera and Internet Explorer.

This doesn’t come into play that often since these browsers are frequently not covered in test suites anymore by developers working on web applications. In addition, if you’re doing web scraping, having access to both Chrome and Firefox should be more than enough to make a working solution.

How do Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium Handle Headless Browser Testing?

All of the browser automation libraries handle headless browser testing extremely well. Since they are designed to run tests on web applications, headless is actually the mode they are run in the most.

Therefore, there is no clear victor among these libraries for headless browser testing: you need to look at other differences such as ease of use, speed, and concurrency.

Which Library Provides Better Documentation and Community Support: Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium?

Selenium is the oldest of these libraries, which means that there are tutorials available for almost anything. It’s reasonably documented , which enables you to find info you need if there is a necessity, but there isn’t a lot of handholding from the Selenium side. If you’re using an unofficial binding library, though, you might fall into problems finding the right calls that mirror the ones used in the official API.

Playwright is the newest out of the libraries, which means that it will have the least amount of community-made tutorials. But the team behind Playwright is laser-focused on providing a great onboarding and user experience, so Playwright has the best documentation out of all these libraries. The community is also fantastic. Most basic and intermediate things are definitely covered with a tutorial on the internet, and there are places to ask questions, such as the community Discord .

Puppeteer is sandwiched in the middle, and it’s not a great spot. While the documentation is still from the age where people were expected to find the necessary information without much help, it’s not that old to have as many community-created pieces of content as Selenium. Therefore, you might need to analyze docs for a while until you get your Puppeteer solution up and running. Some parts of the community have migrated to Playwright as well, which makes it slower to receive an answer for a specific inquiry on a community server.

Conclusion

Overall, Selenium and Playwright are the most common picks for a browser automation library. Selenium has a large library of community-made tutorials and guides, and can support virtually any browser out there. Meanwhile, Playwright has a very active community and an awesome development team working on cranking out new features by the dozen.

As always, the choice of a library is not that easy. If you and your team already have experience with any of the libraries, it might be a good idea to stick with what you know. All of the libraries are functional, and the main differences between them are in the ways they operate, API, and quality-of-life features. But if you’re thinking about the future, Playwright seems like the solution that will be the main browser automation option in the years to come.

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