Start from your actual constraints, not a feature checklist
Every framework comparison article eventually lists the same features side by side. The more useful question is: what does your team actually need that the others genuinely can't do well?
Playwright
- Strongest at: cross-browser coverage (Chromium/Firefox/WebKit from one API), auto-waiting that eliminates most explicit-wait boilerplate, native support for multiple tabs/iframes/network interception, and a genuinely fast built-in test runner with parallelism out of the box.
- Weaker at: broad legacy-browser support (no real IE story, understandably), and the ecosystem — while growing fast — is younger than Selenium's, so some niche enterprise integrations still lag.
Selenium
- Strongest at: the widest real-browser/version support of any tool, the largest and most mature ecosystem (every CI system, every reporting tool, every grid provider supports it natively), and it's still the closest thing to an industry-standard skill that transfers across companies.
- Weaker at: auto-waiting isn't built in (you write your own wait strategy), and raw WebDriver API calls are more verbose than Playwright's higher-level actions.
Cypress
- Strongest at: developer experience — the interactive test runner with time-travel debugging is genuinely best-in-class for writing and debugging tests quickly, and its network-stubbing story is very ergonomic.
- Weaker at: historically single-tab, single-origin per test (native multi-tab/multi-domain support has improved but still has more caveats than Playwright), and it runs inside the browser itself rather than driving it externally, which shapes what's possible for certain low-level browser interactions.
A practical decision framework
- Do you need true cross-browser (including WebKit/Safari) coverage in CI? Playwright is the strongest fit today.
- Is your team already deep in Selenium Grid infrastructure, or do you need support for an unusual/older browser? Migrating away has a real cost that may not be worth it — Selenium remains a completely valid choice.
- Is your priority fast iteration and debugging experience for a small-to-mid frontend team, more than raw cross-browser breadth? Cypress's DX is hard to beat.
The trade-off nobody likes admitting
Migrating a mature Selenium suite to Playwright is a real, multi-month engineering investment for a large codebase — the "Playwright is strictly better" narrative online glosses over that migration cost. For a brand-new project with no existing suite, the calculus is much simpler and Playwright is usually the easiest default to recommend today.