3. Why Companies Choose Playwright Over Alternatives

Speed and reliability vs Selenium

Two distinct claims worth separating:

• Speed: Playwright communicates with the browser directly over CDP/WebSocket (see Part 1, Chapter 3), which is a lower-overhead path than Selenium's WebDriver protocol, which adds an extra HTTP layer (the WebDriver server) between your test code and the
• Reliability: this comes almost entirely from auto-waiting. A Selenium suite without carefully hand-tuned explicit waits will produce intermittent failures that have nothing to do with real bugs — just timing. Teams that migrate to Playwright commonly report their flaky-test rate dropping substantially, simply because the waiting problem is handled by the framework instead of by every individual test author remembering to do it right.