You will be asked to choose a tool, or to defend the one you have. The junior answer is to list features of the tool you know best. The senior answer starts with the constraints.
Playwright is the tool I would pick for most new web projects today. That makes it more important, not less, to be honest about where it is the wrong choice. Being able to say that is what makes people trust your recommendation.
Playwright is a good fit when:
- You want fast parallel runs without paying for a service. This is a genuine advantage over Cypress.
- You need several browsers, including Safari through WebKit.
- Your flows cross tabs, domains or iframes.
- Your team writes TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java or C#. The same tool covers all of them.
- You want excellent debugging after the fact. The trace viewer is the best tool of its kind.
Playwright is the wrong tool when:
- Your team has a large, working Selenium suite and no real problem. Migration costs months and produces the same coverage you already had. "Playwright is more modern" is not a business case.
- You need to test a desktop application or a native mobile app. Playwright is for browsers. Appium and similar tools exist for those.
- Your organisation requires a tool with long commercial support contracts. Some regulated companies really do have this constraint, and Selenium's age is an advantage there.
- Your team is new to testing and needs the simplest possible debugging loop. Cypress's live command log is friendlier for a first week, even though the trace viewer is stronger afterwards.
Notice that none of these are about which tool is "better". They are about fit.
Now the question you will actually face: should we migrate?
Usually the answer is no. A migration costs months, and at the end you have exactly the same coverage you started with. That is a lot of work to show zero new value.
Migration makes sense when the current tool blocks something you truly need, or when the suite is so broken that you are rewriting the tests anyway. In that second case, migrating while you rewrite is nearly free.
If you do migrate, do it gradually. Run both suites for a while. Move the most valuable tests first. Never stop the old suite until the new one covers the same ground, because "we will finish it next quarter" is how teams end up with two half-suites and no confidence.
Remember this: choose for your constraints, not your preferences, and be able to say where your favourite tool loses.
No problem for this lecture. Tool choice is a discussion, not an exercise.