Question brief
Selenium to Playwright migration cost (2026 ledger)
Selenium to Playwright is the dominant 2026 migration. Real effort lives in three places: test rewrite, CI rewire, and team retraining. The ledger below uses our standard $85/hr engineer rate.
Direct answer
Section 1
Test rewrite
Most Selenium tests port to Playwright with a 1-to-1 mapping plus a wait-strategy cleanup. Budget ~30 minutes per simple test, ~2 hours per complex test.
Section 2
CI rewire
Playwright's reporter, parallelism, and fixture model are different enough that the CI workflow needs a rewrite, not a port. Budget 2-4 engineer-weeks.
Section 3
Team retraining
Most QA engineers up-skill to Playwright in a week of focused work. Budget half a day per engineer of pair-programming with a Playwright-fluent lead.
Section 4
When not to migrate
Polyglot Selenium estates with significant Java / C# / Ruby investment are usually the wrong migration target. Stay on Selenium and invest the migration budget in flake control instead.
Migration ledger
| Suite scale | Engineer-weeks | Indicative cost | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 tests | 2-4 weeks | $6,800 - $13,600 | Single engineer, fits in a sprint |
| 500 tests | 6-12 weeks | $20,400 - $40,800 | Two engineers, including CI rewire |
| 2,000 tests | 20-32 weeks | $68,000 - $108,800 | Small team, phased migration recommended |