seleniumvsplaywright

Apache-2.0 198 30 34,072

54.1 million (month) Apr 25 2008 4.43.0(2026-04-10 06:47:01 ago)

14,506 5 82 Apache-2.0

Feb 24 2021 53.2 million (month) 1.58.0(2026-01-30 15:09:24 ago)

Selenium is a Python package that allows developers to automate web browsers. It provides a way for developers to interact with web browsers programmatically, simulating user interactions such as clicking links, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. Selenium can be used to automate tasks such as web scraping, testing web applications, and automating repetitive tasks on websites.

Selenium is built on top of WebDriver, which is a browser automation API that allows Selenium to interact with web browsers. Selenium supports a wide variety of web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

One of the main advantages of Selenium is that it can be used with many different programming languages, not only Python, and it also supports different platforms.

The package also provide a set of APIs that allows you to interact with web pages, you can locate elements, interact with them, get their properties and interact with javascript, you can use the APIs to automate the browser and interact with web pages in the same way a human user would.

Selenium is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks because it allows developers to automate web browsers in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.

Overall, Selenium is a powerful and versatile tool for automating web browsers and is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks.

playwright is a Python package that allows developers to automate web browsers for end-to-end testing, web scraping, and web performance analysis. It is built on top of WebKit, Mozilla's Gecko, and Microsoft's EdgeHTML, and it is designed to be fast, reliable, and easy to use.

playwright is similar to Selenium, but it provides a more modern and powerful API, with features such as automatic waiting for elements, automatic retries, and built-in support for browser contexts, which allow you to open multiple pages in a single browser instance.

Playwright also provides an asynchronous client which makes scaling playwright-powered web scrapers easier than alternatives (like Selenium)

Example Use

```python from selenium import webdriver # Create an instance of the webdriver driver = webdriver.Firefox() # Navigate to a website driver.get("http://www.example.com") # Find an element by its id element = driver.find_element_by_id("example-id") # Interact with the element element.click() # Find an element by its name element = driver.find_element_by_name("example-name") # Fill an input form element.send_keys("example text") # Find and click a button driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[text()='Search']").click() # Wait for the page to load driver.implicitly_wait(10) # Get the page title print(driver.title) # Close the browser driver.close() ```

```python from playwright import sync_playwright # Start Playwright with sync_playwright() as playwright: # Launch a browser instance browser = playwright.chromium.launch() # Open a new context (tab) context = browser.new_context() # Create a new page in the context page = context.new_page() # Navigate to a website page.goto("https://www.example.com") # Find an element by its id element = page.get_by_id("example-id") # Interact with the element element.click() # Fill an input form page.get_by_name("example-name").fill("example text") # Find and click a button page.get_by_xpath("//button[text()='Search']").click() # Wait for the page to load page.wait_for_selector("#results") # Get the page title print(page.title) # Close the browser browser.close() ```

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