🎭 Playwright vs ✅ Selenium | Browser Automation 2021 Showdown
In this episode, we draw the line: mature and experienced vs. young and energetic? Which is the automation tool of choice: 🎭 Playwright or ✅ Selenium? With my trusty scale ⚖️, we'll weigh some of the key features of these two: browser support, languages, web interactions, speed, community, waiting and so on.
Who's gonna win? Could be Selenium, or maybe Playwright? Test Automation or automated testing? Nobody knows 👀 ...
👉 Head over to testopic.com/playwright to join Playwright NTTN.
Other mentioned links
- Checkly speed testing methodology blog.checklyhq.com/puppeteer-vs-selenium-vs-playwright-speed-comparison/#methodology-or-how-we-ran-the-benchmark
- Simon Stuart 2016 email - lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-browser-tools-testing/2016OctDec/0058.html
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:41 Playwright in 30 seconds
01:17 Official browser support
02:05 Language Bindings
02:40 Basic Web Interactions
04:48 Speed
06:03 Speed: Starting the browser
07:58 Waiting
10:37 Community Support
11:41 Playwright native
13:06 Outro
having used both in real world projects for the past few years... once you get used to Playwright, there is almost like no going back. Is so much cleaner and easier to work with.
i 100% agree
Does it have support for cross browser and parallel testing like Selenium grid?
@@dheerajchoudhary4373 yeah and quite a lot faster
@@terencetcf hey terence, can you please provide specific docs link for this. Thanks in advance
Yeah, seems like Hi-Tech stuff.
I'm very happy to have found your channel and very sad to see there isn't much activity here anymore. I think you have a very unique style of delivery, equally informative and entertaining, which is not something easy to find. Very good video 👍
this was very educational, thank you so so much for the knowledge and all the effort that was necessary to produce such a video
Excellent video - thanks Victor! I liked that you weigh things up fairly, with just the right amount of detail, and highlight how any choice about which is "better" ultimately has to be up to the viewer (/user)
I humbly request you to please keep posting more of such content and I really loved your presentation style. Keep up the good work.
Hey this video was so much fun to watch. Hope you will produce more videos, you're a great teacher.
Absolutely great explain and show up! 👍 Feeling like i read good article ❤
A great and informative video. Keep up the good work!
Information: 10tone of voice, speed, gestures: perfect. new subscriber
This was a fantastic comparison. You conviced me to give it a go to Playright
Good informative content by the comparison. It is really awesome to get much knowledge on the latest automation tool.
Glad it was helpful Rahul!
thanks mate, awesome comparison and explanations. cheers
Just found your channel. Excellent Content - Another sub for you sir!
Thank you sir for this amazing video it helped me to better understand the benefits of playwright.
Maestro! Thank you so much for this video! For my current assignment I am looking for the best candidate regarding automated testing tools....this video helps me alot! Thanks! 👍
I see more potential on Playwright in my opinion keep up with them uploads it helps a lot for new devs like me, great video man.
Yes, it does have a lot of potential. Thanks for the support, Fabiel!
Interesting review, i might differ on a few points mentioned... I've been a software developer/tester for 30years, if my life depended on stability and reliability hands down Playright is the winner. Often selenium, especially with newer javascript libraries, angular, react, vue, svelte and others, good luck getting selenium to be reliable. Go back 10 years ago, selenium was fine, but no longer with the virtual Dom... For this reason Playwright, especially with their switch to locators and discouraging ElementHandle, would assert really makes Selenium obsolete. And to be fair, your review was before this, might assert the switch in Playwright was a month or three after your review came out. Can't help thinking of how many "StaleElementExceptions" i get or need retry logic in selenium tests, not so with Playwright.
Awesome video @victor. Great comparison, very well presented. For me Selenium is still my first love for web automation.
Thank you so much, Naveen! I've been following your content for a while now, so it means a lot coming from you!
@@Testopic Keep sharing more content. Looking forward to see a full series on Playwright...
What exactly is `Web automation`?
@@markcuello5 automated tests for your code testing the functionality for you.
Thanks mate! Great job!
Nice video, you've got a new subscriber! I'm going to check out your other vids very shortly.
Amazing video!, Thank you so much!
And Playwright auto-tests almost everything in their repo, so it will be getting better and better without compromising quality and adding new functionality can be done faster in the future with same quality instead of doing less and less frequent releasing. Thanks for the video!
You make an wonderful video.good job
Good knowledge. Thx Man!
hello clever man we need more videos please your explanation are so great to understand
Thanks a lot for the such useful video!
great explanation and thank you
This is the information I have wanted for a long time. I have been to so many tutorials and sites for learning. You are outstanding for me. Short and relevant info. I salute you for this. Best regards from Sweden.
Excelent comparison.
cool review! thanks!
Hello. Thank you for the great educational videos you make. Which of the following software do you choose to test modern software? Cypress or Playwright or Selenium ?
Great video. Thanks Man : )
very good information!! congrats
I recently ran into a drag and drop issue with selenium when you want to drag an element from a frame to another frame. Actions class simply doesn`t do the job. I then tried playwright which just worked right away. Big plus for playwright
so you are saying that you do not know how to use selenium right. This is your lack of knowledge not superiority of plwright
Thanks for the video.
I am just getting into the automation world but from what I have seen from both Playwright looks the easier tool to use. I will be looking at trying both though.
I want to mention that most of the Selenium based frameworks are having really nice features and additions to Selenium library. So working with such framework is making your automation testing efforts easier. So guys please do not only look at Selenium disadvantages or missing features. Most of them are handled in automation frameworks.
Hello Ivo, I agree. There are serious advantages that Selenium has, based on its maturity. One of these advantages is the strong community behind it, which often results in cool libraries and frameworks built around it. But there's a flipside to this as well. Already built frameworks are often cluttered with functionality which most of us will never use. And an even bigger problem occurs when you're already committed to such a framework and you do need something custom from it, only to find out it's hard/impossible to extend due to the bad programming behind the scenes. So, my suggestion is not to rely on frameworks blindly. The decision between an out of the box framework or a lightweight custom one lies on each of us, based on one's own context.
What do you mean by `Selenium library`?
THANK YOUU VIKTORRRRR!!!
Great Video!
Playwright is awesome with its test runner. We can do lots of things, visual comparison. Reports with screenshot and video out of the box, and lot of more features. The locator strategy which is huge comparing to selenium.
Agree, the test runner deserves a presentation on its own! Even the idea of having a dedicated test runner for a browser automation library is quite original. I'm quite curious how it will go.
What is `Locator strategy`?
@@markcuello5 finding element in a webpage, like linktext button inputs and others.
Yeah, i was doing Selenium for a long time and first thing i did after i got used to it was Locator class and automated waiters for all actions/asserts, it was 1k+ lines of additional code. Playwright has it out of the box.
for the "auth reuse" you can do that in selenium too. either with chrome profiles or even saving cookies into a file using pickle or even json files. but It can be a plus if its natively supported by the framework I can agree on that.
hope you can have tutorial about Playwright native features and the use cases of them that you mentioned in the video
Fantastic video
As a user of both Selenium and Playwright at work, I must say Playwright is far superior, much faster, better documentation, and a lot less flaky. Once the Playwright community grows, it will become the industry standard without a doubt.
Nailed it.
Hi bro thanks for this video a question how can i activate vpn in webdrive opera ? (Selenium python )
How Playwright can be integrated with other test requirement like working with excel, pdf, database etc ? As in Selenium-Java, its in the end java based framework that can be extended with Apache PIO, Rest Assured, JDBC etc to have complete robust solution. I am very new to JS based test tools hence no idea how can be work with excel, database, API etc along with web app tests.
What about popups from the OS? For example PIN dialogues to authenticate in a webpage. Can you handle it with playwright?
Nice video..I explored playwright 2 weeks ago and started to build with Python/pytest. Will be good if you have videos for playwrights Python soon. Thanks
Thanks for the feedback and suggestion! Playwright with Python is a good combo and I'm thinking of making a video about it. What would you be interested in?
Dinamic web scraping
@@Testopic I managed to stack python with playwright using vs code and pytest-BDD... some issues whith debbugging in vs code, but getting there
@@Testopic yes please!!
Thanks for the comparison! Is it me or is the sound not well recorded? It jumps up and down between loud and silent parts, what makes some words hard to understand.
Amazing video, thank you. I'am trying to use the playwright but how can integrate a nice debugger in IntelliJ (with robot framework), do you have any idea? I'm using the word "debug" to force the code to stop :(
+1 I'm curious to know as well
the man knows what he is talking about. One question: how is playwrite when data-driven framework is used like google sheets or excel ?
Is the playwright supports mobile testing automation? Thanks
PlayWright has automatic code generator, that's just another next level
Why do I have to use Chrome for incognito tabs. Other browser have icognito modes aswell!
Is this channel still active? Anyone know if Victor is OK or just maybe not uploading content? Asking as I shot an email to the posted email address and it was bounced back. Also, it has been about 8 months since the last upload. I was really hoping for some more Playwright content as we are vetting this solution here. This channel has a few really well put together / easy to follow demos.
Im curious if its possible to capture web api requests by modern dynamic websites like ReactJs backend calls on scrolling the page or load more functionality requests. is it possible in playwright as it is possible with selenium-wire? can anyone confirm this feature for me?
Have you made any course on playwright ?
I chose Playwright! ❤👍
great vid, thanks I know the point that is not supporting IE
Nice
Been a few months since the last request for an update. Anyone have any information on Victor and the status of this channel?
Playwright is the way to go for me
Playwright for sure !
Video quality is high!
So overall, Selenium still rocks after all this years.
forgot to mention that selenium produces a bunch of flaki tests, it doesn't have auto wait like cypress and playwright does, because of that it doesn't handle async code properly. for web page testing I think Selenium is showing it's age it seems. Cypress and Playwright are much better options
Saying typescript is just a superset of javascript is a bit like saying that scala is just a superset of java. On the contrary, the TS support is the shining jewel, and probably how most people are writing playwright tests.
Great comparison and thanks for the video. Two corrections: First, Selenium also supports PHP language and second, the analogy with Chrome Incognito windows is not precise, since all incognito windows are sharing the same session (between them). Opening a new Incognito window while you are logged in into another incognito window will keep you authenticated. Thanks !
What happened to posting every 2 weeks??? I really like your videos 😒
Playwright is asynchronous - thats huge advantage
Why is that?...humans or users to be precise use web apps synchronously.
i still use Playwright! ❤❤❤👍
Selenium all the way but will try Playwright for sure. I personally don't like JS/TS so until it's cooked properly for Java or maybe Python...I might just wait.
Does Playwright Java not have all the capability of JS/TS? Asking because I don't know.
@@jeremycattau1563 JS/TS is a first class language for playwright so you get all the latest/greatest features released there. It does take a while to get available with python and java bindings.
@@RaviSalunkhe85 I'm now seeing that the test runner doesn't work with Java. I wonder if they ever plan to do so.
@@jeremycattau1563 Also, it’s only junit they support for now. Java is the main language which majority of automation folks use. Any tool coming up should make sure to support this stack and it’s related modules.
Selenium supports php as well
I guess Selenium gets the nod for browser support. Probably the main selling point is that it supports the old "pre-chromium" version of Edge. At this point, though, I feel sorry for anyone that still has to support Internet Explorer. And I hope that those computers are NOT on the public facing Internet.
I've discovered something that playwright does better then selenium: using proxies. Its very easy to use proxies that needs authorization. On selenium i had to use a bunch of third party libraries.
Help me
never know Shavo Odadjian also a programmer 😅
Cypress it is then...
I didn't like this comparison because it doesn't consider ease of use. I was watching a video on Playwright and that was enough to be impressed at how simple is Playwright syntax in comparison to Selenium, from the code itself to even the imports and environment preparation (that requires you to download a webdriver whenever the broswer you use is updated). It's like going from hell to heaven, but it's not considered in the video.
this year, the sites to be automated to make money are so hostile to bots that i don't think PlayWright can do the job. Because in Selenium, there's Undetected Chromedriver
Based on all the comments on here I am going to give Playwright a go!
Виктор?
Playwright does not support extensions.
What are the other limitations?
Id argue that there’s no universe where the language support point should go to Selenium because “Ruby is more of a language than Typescript” Typescript makes up the bulk of enterprise web apps these days, it’s used exponentially more than Ruby, and it’s not even close (more than almost any other language actually) So are devs going to use the language that is already required of them? Or flipping RUBY. It’s like saying my homemade custom Hotwheels company started in my garage is more of a car company than Lexus because technically Lexus is just a Toyota.
With Playwright say goodbye to flaky tests.
Selenium doesn't even work as intended. Use playwright....
Who is the BDD equivalent of Playwright?
Hey! I'm afraid Playwright on its own can't do BDD. You would need to integrate it with a different tool, like Cucumber, to use BDD-specific features. Tally Barak wrote some material about this: tally-b.medium.com/e2e-testing-with-cucumber-and-playwright-9584d3ef3360. To make things easy, she published a nice template that you can use to start new projects: github.com/Tallyb/cucumber-playwright
@@Testopic Thank you for those links. What about test case management? are there any open source projects that are "next gen" that we should keep our eyes on?
Using both of them, I now absolutely prefer Playwright because it has some nice features that Selenium does not (at least not so easily). - hover() instead of ActionChains - shadow DOM handling - selectors in - expect_request() to handle network requests - automatic scroll into view if needed - etc., etc. .... And regarding my test scripts, it is simply faster and more stable (no more WebdriverExceptions when the webdriver decides to freeze... A/K/A "Timed out receiving message from renderer")... I assume that all Selenium users are aware of this issue... ;-)
I believe Playwright with Java does not have softassertion alike selenium - Playwright (assertThat - fails and stops execution at that point) - or i am not sure if it depends on the test runner framework we use (alike testng has org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert) ???
Help me