QA Wolf vs Selenium WebDriver

Quote on request

Free and open source

Annual service contracts. Substantially cheaper than hiring an in-house automation team, substantially more expensive than a tool licence.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

QA Wolf · since 2019

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

• Removes the maintenance burden entirely — no flaky-test triage on your side.
• You own the Playwright code, so leaving is possible.
• Coverage arrives in weeks rather than quarters.

• 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.

• It is headcount, not software — the cost profile is completely different from a licence.
• External team needs deep product context to test meaningfully.
• Fast-moving products can outpace the feedback loop with an external author.

• 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.

Funded startups that need coverage now and have no QA hire in the plan.

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