Testing / Playwright Interview questions
What is the difference between Playwright and Selenium?
Both automate browsers, but they take different architectural approaches, and that shapes most of the practical differences developers run into.
| Playwright | Selenium |
| Talks directly to the browser over its own protocol | Talks to the browser through the WebDriver protocol |
| Built-in auto-waiting for actionability | Requires explicit or implicit waits |
| Native multi-tab/context support in one process | Each window/tab typically needs separate handling |
| Built-in test runner, tracing, and parallelism | Relies on external frameworks (JUnit, pytest, etc.) for these |
| Officially supports JS/TS, Python, Java, .NET | Supports a much broader range of language bindings |
In practice, this means Playwright tests tend to need less custom waiting logic and run faster, while Selenium's larger ecosystem and longer track record still matter for teams already invested in it or needing a language Playwright doesn't cover.
A key architectural difference is that Playwright:
Which capability is built into Playwright but typically requires external tooling in Selenium?
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