Hello, I am curious to understand if Selenium is still something that you use as your test automation tool? Is it something you consider for new projects or would you move on to something like cypress or playwright?
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Yes, definitely, selenium is my first choice for automation.
In my current organization, both Selenium and playwright are used for automation on different projects however, I keep exploring Selenium for my own self-projects with Python.
I can relate where these thoughts are coming from, obviously, there is a lot of hype for playwright in the market.
But at the end of the day, every tool has its own pros and cons, if selenium has cons, then playwright also has. However, due to heavy marketing from Microsoft for playwright, it is being assumed that it is the future.
All those legacy projects in which Selenium has been used for automation won’t migrate so easily to Playwright or Cypress, and the reason is simple. Even though Playwright is open-source for now, considering Microsoft as its parent company, most people doubt if it will ever remain open-source.
With so many no-code, low-code & ai tools in the market for UI automation, obviously, time is tough for Selenium, but still,l it’s a stable automation framework that has existed for more than 20 years in the market.
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I’m not an automation expert, but I posted a poll on LinkedIn to gauge insight.
Also, a poll here, cause why not? 
If you had to choose, what would you go with? Selenium, Playwright or Cypress?
- Selenium
- Playwright
- Cypress
- Something else, please comment
0
voters
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Of course that it depends on what software product you’re testing, what layer you’re testing at, and why and what are you automating to support the testing.
Lately I’ve been building automation tools and data generators directly with python.
As for Selenium vs Cypress vs Playwright vs Robot vs Tosca vs TestComplete vs Katalon…
Sometimes the company already have an automation suite in one of them. And I think the distribution is quite equal between those first 3.
Other times you want to switch because there’s too many limitations in one vs the others (cost, performance, speed).
Also what the other engineers support/like and what the managers steer you towards and what the product code is built with can influence the decision.
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Selenium is a tool like any other. We’d want to know the outcome or what we’re trying to validate. Tools like selenium are never my go to thought, I’d always try to shift left and down. So that way we can try to focus on Unit Tests, Integration and then E2E UI tests using something like selenium.
There are many forms of automation, selenium is a tool designed for specific tests. Is it considered, yes, is it my first choice. Not usually, but testing anything GUI is generally lower on my list of test automations.
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If it only were so simple 
I go with what my clients needs most if the best choice would be Selenium, I’ll pick that, if it’s Cypress, we’ll do it in Cypress 
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I agree for all the above , also from an interview perspective, Selenium is still very relevant and likely will be for years to come…Many large organizations, esp…enterprises, have long standing Selenium frameworks in place…Selenium WebDriver is part of almost every QA Automation syllabus and is heavily covered in most interview processes…Its a good foundational framework one can start off their automation journey which one can rely on for complex web app esp those that require a lot of browser specific customizations or workarounds.
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Test-related automation is much broader than Selenium could ever be. But I know what you mean, so let’s scope this answer to web UI testing.
When I started in my current project, we had a bunch of Selenium tests that nobody touched in few years, so you couldn’t even start them. I introduced new Playwright-based framework and ported existing tests - Playwright was 2-3 years old at the time. Honestly, I am not looking back.
Playwright by default provides a lot of things that usually need to be implemented in Selenium-based frameworks - checking for element presence and visibility before interaction etc.
Tracing is great for test debugging.
I know Playwright has tools for locator querying or creating tests based on your actions, but I have not tried these.
However, Selenium was pretty much the only tool around for a good decade, so there is a lot of existing code that needs maintenance. Another project I am helping has Selenium based automation and over the years they developed most of what Playwright provides. If you compare Playwright with that custom framework, they are pretty even - which makes it that much harder to justify porting existing automation to a new tool.
As @komalgc said, you are still likely to be hired to work with Selenium and encounter Selenium during interviews. So it’s good idea to know something about it and have some experience with it. And at the end of the day, some testing, web testing and web UI testing fundamentals are the same, regardless of tool.
personal projects means projects for your portfolio?
Yes, I use selenium for the same.
I never managed to get into selenium, I’ve picked it up a few times over the years but tended to feel its usage allowed for a less optimal coverage model.
One of the questions I tended to ask was would developers use it and tended to find that a lot of developers just would not touch it and it ended up being a tester focused tool rather than a team collaboration tool. As a result it often skewed the appropriate level in the stack coverage with often far too much being covered at the UI layer. This specific risk potentially meant for many that selenium potentially did more harm to the industry than good, now thats a massive speculative jump but without I do consider if better stack coverage would have been more common and maybe also better investigative testing across the board.
I never really got to the clear explanation on why developers avoided it and in turn did not grasp why testers would embrace it if developers would not.
Cypress I found developers more likely to get involved so purely on that basis I’d tend to go cypress over selenium.
I’m not sure if playwright carries that same risk, over focus on UI, less collaboration with developers and maybe even less investigative testing but I do see it as a more common choice these days.
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It’s surprising how little attention SeleniumBase gets in automation discussions!
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Yes, definitely. Selenium is still considered to be a powerful tool. However, it totally depends upon the application which is under automation and the business needs. For legacy applications (or non-js tech stack) selenium is considered to be the best choice. For applications centered around non-tech stack playwright could be the right choice. We have a lot of tools, frameworks available now and it will keep introducing every year. So choosing the right automation tools purely depends upon the application tech stack and business needs. I feel selenium being so powerful is never outdated. Anybody having knowledge and understanding of Selenium can adopt new tools easily whichever and whenever it is introduced in the market.
I would choose Playwright with below reasons
- Its syntax is easier
- Less dependency on other libaries tool ( You get screenshot / videos / traces / waiting mechanism)
- Reporting is even inbuilt
- debugging is super easy
- Parallelism is inbuilt
- API automation is doable
IMHO, playwright is notepad++ and selenium can be called notepad
I love selenium as it taught me all concepts related to automation. But my love should not come as a bias while choosing the tool.
One basic thing we should understand, if someone will create a tool now compared to a tool which was built 20 years ago, definitely they will try to overcome the problem in existing tool.
Selenium is a library and playwright is framework.
I would prefer Playwright in all cases for a new project. If you give me reason why i should not happy to understand
We use Cypress for an earlier test stage in the most new projects. We use Sahi Pro since many years (Web-Driver technology based) but we have business user using it. That wouldn’t be possible with Selenium.
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Ok, I will try it thanks
Yes! Selenium is my first choice.
Also, it’s true open source and community first.
Playwright is Microsoft backed and is maintained in an open source fashion by Microsoft employees.
I trusted them with WinAppDriver. And now, its dead. Microsoft no longer supports it.
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Selenium all the way long. I am biased in that sense. I love selenium as it was the first tool I started using when I started doing automation back in 2015-2016. Either its Selenium WebDriver or Selenium IDE. Sadly the support for SeleniumIDE extension is removed. For most of my private repos (repos I keep building for learning purposes-planning to make some of them public soon) I have used selenium.
However in my current workspace, its also important to avoid automation risks and also we choose tool depending upon team skillset. We do use Cypress right now. As some of us already said Selenium has huge community and is open source. It always gives it this edge. Selenium always personally 
