Playwright vs Selenium: When to Switch (30-Day Hybrid)

• Stay on Selenium if the suite is stable, grid cost is accepted, and no new browser automation is planned this quarter.
• Hybrid (default) if you ship weekly and Selenium PRs take more than a day to diagnose. Playwright traces pay for themselves here.
• Switch the critical path now if you need auto-wait, trace viewer, and parallel workers without standing up more grid VMs.

Day 1–7: pick three money paths (login, checkout, refund). Rewrite only those in Playwright with role locators. Day 8–21: run both jobs in CI; Playwright is the merge gate for those paths; Selenium still runs nightly. Day 22–30: delete the Selenium twins only after Playwright has seven green nights.

jobs:
  playwright-critical:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npx playwright install --with-deps chromium
      - run: npx playwright test --grep @critical
  selenium-nightly:
    if: github.event_name == 'schedule'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: mvn -q test

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test";

test("login @critical", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("/login");
  await page.getByLabel("Email").fill("qa@example.com");
  await page.getByLabel("Password").fill(process.env.QA_PASSWORD!);
  await page.getByRole("button", { name: "Sign in" }).click();
  await expect(page.getByRole("heading", { name: "Overview" })).toBeVisible();
});

Do not translate every TestNG class. The leftover Selenium pack is a defect net, not a career path. Before planning the migration scope, score your suite maturity with the free QA maturity assessment. Enterprise software testing modernization on the Enterprise page is how we run this as a factory. Implementation help sits under AI quality engineering services.

• Pass: A checkout regression fails Playwright @critical on the PR and never waits for the nightly Selenium job.
• Fail: You rewrite 400 Selenium tests in a branch that cannot merge for six weeks.
• Cleanup: After seven green nights, delete the Selenium twins and the unused grid nodes for those paths only.