Playwright vs Selenium
Neither charges a licence, so everything here is labour — and between two frameworks that comes almost entirely from flakiness and the repair it causes.
Also searched as: Selenium vs Playwright
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Model Playwright vs Selenium on your estate
We have not measured these products and publish no cost for either. Choose how each should be modelled and the 5-year comparison appears below.
Choose a category for Playwright and Selenium to see the chart. Or skip straight to the calculator and enter measured figures instead.
Open the CalculatorThe scenario these figures describe
- One application with 300 test cases (90 basic, 150 average, 60 complex).
- 12 full regression runs a year, each finding about 5 defects.
- 40 new cases added a year as the product grows.
- A loaded cost of $120k per engineer per year across 1800 working hours.
- A 5-year horizon.
Reference: what each category of tooling costs at this scenario
By category only — the numbers the chart above is built from.
| Cost over 5 years | Homegrown | AI-native tool | Legacy script tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | $303,333 | $39,867 | $166,367 |
| Licensing | $0 | $150,000 | $37,500 |
| Infrastructure | $90,000 | $30,000 | $60,000 |
| Total | $393k | $220k | $264k |
| Build effort | 1,605 hrs | 143 hrs | 843 hrs |
With the licence line at zero, repair rate is the whole comparison
Both are frameworks you build on, so both carry the homegrown shape and neither gets an authoring advantage here — claiming one authors faster would be opinion dressed as arithmetic. Maintenance is the difference worth modelling: raise one repair rate a few points and the gap becomes substantial.
Migration cost is the number people leave out
With a large existing suite the question is not which you would choose today but whether the maintenance saving repays rewriting it. Build inputs have a migration mode for this, typically 40–60% of authoring from scratch. Set your case count as a migration and check the payback.
This is not a cost comparison for most teams
At equal repair rates these two cost the same, and no modelling changes that. The real decision is language and browser support, parallel execution, familiarity and hiring — engineering judgements, not financial ones. Use this to size the maintenance difference, not to settle the choice.
About each tool
Sourced, dated facts only — no cost estimates.
Playwright
Open-source framework
Open-source browser automation library maintained by Microsoft. Free to use; the cost of ownership is entirely engineering time plus whatever CI infrastructure you run it on.
- Licence Apache 2.0. No licence fee. source
- Maintainer Maintained by Microsoft as an open-source project. source
Last reviewed 2026-09-09
Selenium
Open-source framework
The long-established open-source browser automation project and the basis of the WebDriver standard. Free to use, with cost of ownership concentrated in authoring and maintenance.
- Licence Apache 2.0. No licence fee. source
- Standard The W3C WebDriver standard grew out of the project. source
Last reviewed 2026-09-09
Run this with your own numbers
The figures above describe a generic 300-case suite. Yours is not generic. Put in your own case counts, release cadence and hourly rate and the comparison becomes evidence rather than illustration.
Open the CalculatorQuestions
Which costs less to own?
Whichever your team repairs less often. Neither charges a licence, so the entire cost is engineering time, and maintenance accounts for most of it across five years.
Should we migrate an existing Selenium suite?
Model it as a migration rather than a fresh build, and compare the maintenance saving against the rewrite. If the payback exceeds your planning horizon, the answer is usually no.