Why is Playwright generally faster than Selenium?

Several architectural choices compound to make Playwright suites faster in practice, not just one single feature.

First, its direct protocol connection to the browser avoids the extra network hop and JSON wire protocol overhead of WebDriver's HTTP-based command model, so each command round-trip is cheaper. Second, browser contexts are extremely lightweight compared to launching a full new browser process - Selenium's WebDriver model traditionally maps closer to one browser instance per session, while Playwright can spin up many isolated contexts from a single already-running browser.

Third, built-in auto-waiting removes the artificial delay of manually-coded sleep() calls or overly generous implicit waits that Selenium suites commonly accumulate as a workaround for flakiness - Playwright waits exactly as long as needed for each actionability check and no longer.

Finally, Playwright Test's default parallelism across worker processes, combined with cheap context creation, lets large suites scale out with less per-test overhead than spinning up equivalent isolated Selenium sessions.