

Selenium is also fairly resource-heavy, in part because it has generally been used to run full browsers. Selenium tests are commonly flaky, failing intermittently for non-obvious reasons that are difficult to reproduce. However, Selenium has a reputation for being unreliable. While its primary use case has been implementing test suites for websites, programmers have also used it for things like taking screenshots or automating tasks when websites don’t provide APIs. Selenium has been around since 2004, and for a long time, it was the go-to tool for this category. It might be helpful to understand some historical context first.īrowser automation is not a new technology.


Let’s take a look at what makes each of them interesting and consider the factors that should go into deciding which one to use. Puppeteer is also a Node.js library for browser automation. Playwright is a Node.js library for browser automation.
