Tool brief · open-source

Selenium: lab brief

Selenium remains the most language-broad runner on the market. Selenium 4 with Selenium Manager handles driver provisioning automatically and is the default polyglot baseline.

verified 2026-06-21 · vendor page

Direct answer

Our take: Selenium is not the right first pick in 2026 for a greenfield JS team, but it is still the safest pick for a polyglot estate with Java, C#, Ruby, and Python suites in the same repo.

Composite

64 / 100

Language breadth (95) is the highest on the board. Maintainability (55) is the lowest among the open-source runners.

Pricing

Public

Free / open-source

Free under Apache 2.0. The hidden cost is engineer time on flake control; our TCO model applies a 1.6x engineer-hour multiplier to Selenium.

Model

open source

Open-source (Apache 2.0)

Six axes

Per-axis measurement

Parallelism75

Self-heal40

Mobile50

API coverage55

Language breadth95

Maintainability55

When to pick

Pick Selenium when

Polyglot organisations (more than one test language)
Legacy estates with existing Selenium investment
Teams that need WebDriver-protocol guarantees

When NOT to use this tool

Out-of-the-box flake without a disciplined wait strategy
Mobile native testing (use Appium)

Recent changes

What changed

Selenium 4.x stable; Selenium Manager handles driver provisioning automatically; adoption share continues to slip vs Playwright in 2026 dev surveys.

Migration to Playwright is the dominant 2026 trajectory for JS-heavy Selenium suites. The /q/migration-cost-selenium-to-playwright page has the ledger.

Where to go next