I recently joined a company that currently uses WebdriverIO for its automation tests.
While it works, I’ve been exploring Playwright and feel it could offer better reliability and speed.
However, I don’t have solid data to back this up, just personal experience.
For those who’ve made the switch or evaluated both, what are the key advantages of Playwright vs WebdriverIO? I’m particularly interested in things like:
Test speed and flakiness
Cross-browser support
Debugging tools
CI/CD integration
Community support and updates
Any insights or comparisons would help me build a stronger case to present internally. Thanks!
We made the switch from WebdriverIO to Playwright about a year ago, and the biggest difference we noticed was test speed and flakiness.
With WebdriverIO, we constantly battled random failures, especially in CI.
Playwright’s auto-waiting and isolation model just made everything smoother.
Our test suite, which used to take ~15 minutes now runs in under 8, and we’ve seen a big drop in retry counts.
The setup felt more modern too, with built-in parallelism and trace viewer out of the box.
I’ve used both pretty heavily, and what sold me on Playwright was the cross-browser and debugging experience.
It’s dead simple to spin up tests in Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with the same script, and the trace viewer is a lifesaver when trying to debug CI failures.
WebdriverIO has grown a lot, but it still depends on the WebDriver protocol, which can introduce latency and some weird edge cases.
Playwright’s browser context model also makes test isolation much easier.
In our case, we did a side-by-side eval when revamping our E2E suite.
WebdriverIO was more configurable and flexible, especially for legacy apps, but Playwright won on CI/CD integration and ease of maintenance.
Its GitHub Actions integration was super clean, and the test runner is built to scale.
One caveat: Playwright’s learning curve is a bit steeper for custom setups, but the community and docs have caught up fast.
We haven’t looked back since switching.