Puppeteer vs Selenium WebDriver

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Google · since 2017

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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