Playwright vs Selenium vs browser clouds

Selenium still works, but its session and context model predates modern headless browsers. Persistent profiles, per-context isolation and CDP-level streaming are second-class.

Hosted browser clouds remove infrastructure work but add per-session cost and put session data on a vendor’s machines. For a product built around persistent logins, that is the wrong trade.

Playwright gives us per-account contexts, clean storage-state export and import for our encrypted vault, and CDP access for the live login stream — all self-hosted, so sessions never leave hardware we control.