Playwright vs Selenium in 2026 — which should a new team pick?

Question

We are greenfield, TypeScript stack, ~20 engineers. Everyone keeps asking "why not Selenium, it is battle tested." What is the honest 2026 answer?

Mei Liu · Accepted Answer

Honest 2026 answer: for a greenfield TS team, Playwright wins on DX (auto-wait, trace viewer, codegen, parallelism out of the box) and CI ergonomics. Selenium still wins if you must support IE-mode, legacy Java tooling, or a Grid you already operate. Selenium 4 is genuinely good — but you will spend the first sprint wiring up what Playwright ships on day one.

Playwright vs Selenium in 2026 — which should a new team pick?

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