Selenium WebDriver vs Puppeteer

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. The real cost is grid infrastructure or a device-cloud subscription.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

Widely used

Google · since 2017

• The widest language and browser support of anything in the category, including legacy browser versions.
• A W3C standard, so it will outlive any single vendor. Skills transfer between employers.
• Every device cloud speaks Selenium, which keeps you portable between vendors.

• Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
• First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
• Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.

• No built-in waiting strategy, reporting, parallelism or assertions — expect to assemble and maintain a framework around it.
• Explicit waits are your problem, and getting them wrong is the number one source of flake in real Selenium suites.
• Out-of-process communication makes it slower than Playwright or Cypress.

• No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
• Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
• For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.

Enterprises with polyglot teams, legacy browser requirements, or an existing grid investment.

Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.