Ditching Selenium for Playwright + Pytest: What We Gained (and Why We Never Looked Back)

Description and use

Switching from Selenium to Playwright + Pytest cut regression time, reduced flakiness, and sped up debugging through auto‑waiting, parallel runs, and built‑in tracing.

Problem

Flaky failures, slow CI pipelines, and painful debugging plagued a Selenium‑based E2E suite for a data‑heavy enterprise web app.

Outcome

Switching to Playwright reduced regression time by 42%, flaky failures by 71%, and debugging effort by 75%.

Workflow

• 1. Replace Selenium with Playwright + pytest via pytest‑playwright plugin.
• 2. Remove hard‑coded Thread.sleep calls; rely on Playwright auto‑waits.
• 3. Configure pytest‑xdist for parallel runs (-n auto).
• 4. Enable tracing, video, screenshot on failure in pytest.ini.
• 5. Structure framework with Page Object Model, components, data factories, utils.
• 6. Write tests that use page objects and expect assertions.
• 7. Run tests locally with --headed --slowmo for debugging, view trace with playwright show-trace.

Evidence

Regression time went from ~6 hours to ~3.5, and the flaky rate went from ~35% to ~10%.

Source

Playwright controls browsers through a protocol connection ... It sees what the browser is doing and checks that an element is attached, visible, stable, enabled, and able to receive events before it acts.

Source

With pytest‑xdist, tests run concurrently, and full regression time dropped from ~6 hours to ~3.5 hours.

Source