Instead of Selenium: Playwright

Why Playwright is better

• Before a click, Playwright checks that the element is visible, stable, enabled and receives events. Selenium's own docs call timing races one of the primary causes of flaky tests and leave the waiting strategy to you.
• Playwright Test bundles the runner, assertions, isolation, parallel runs, an HTML report and a trace viewer. With Selenium you add a test framework, a reporter and usually Selenium Grid yourself.
• It covers Safari's engine through WebKit on Windows, Linux and macOS, plus mobile emulation for Chrome on Android and Mobile Safari, and downloads the browsers it needs.
• Sharding across CI machines is one flag, --shard=1/4, with no grid to run.
• It has official bindings for JavaScript and TypeScript, Python, Java and .NET, so most Selenium teams can stay in their language.

When to keep Selenium

Keep Selenium when you need real Safari on macOS, a device cloud built around WebDriver, or a language such as Ruby or PHP that Playwright has no official binding for. A large, stable Selenium suite is not worth rewriting just to switch. For scraping, you can keep your Selenium scripts and run them on Lightpanda instead of Chrome. In Lightpanda's own benchmark, the 43 Selenium documentation tests that pass on both browsers ran 2.6x faster with 7.5x less memory.

Switching

Each test gets rewritten. Locators and actions map closely, so finding an element and clicking it becomes page.locator(...).click(), and most explicit waits can go. A practical path is to write new tests in Playwright and port old ones when they need changes, rather than converting the whole suite at once.

Watch out

Playwright tests against its own browser builds by default. It can also run the Chrome and Edge installed on the machine, but its WebKit build is not the Safari your users run. Microsoft controls Playwright, while Selenium implements the W3C WebDriver standard. If you take the Lightpanda route instead, note that its WebDriver support is new. Frames, alerts and Shadow DOM are not supported yet, and it cannot take real screenshots.

Also worth a look

• Lightpanda A headless browser without graphical rendering that speaks WebDriver; for scraping or functional checks of forms and text, keep your Selenium scripts and point them at it instead of chromedriver.

More newer, better browser automation tools and headless browsers

• Puppeteer →, use Lightpanda
• Cypress →, use Playwright