We migrated 300 Selenium tests to Playwright — here is what surprised us

After 8 months of incremental migration, our entire Selenium suite (Java + TestNG) is now Playwright + TypeScript. A few honest takeaways: **What went better than expected:** - Auto-waiting eliminated almost all `Thread.sleep` calls immediately - The locator API is genuinely superior — our selector maintenance dropped by ~60% - Multi-browser support in CI was trivial to add once the suite was working **What was harder than expected:** - Rewriting the Java Page Object hierarchy in TypeScript took 3x longer than estimated - Some tests relied on Selenium's synchronous model in subtle ways that caused async bugs in Playwright - Our CI infrastructure needed reworking for the Playwright Docker image **Would we do it again?** Yes, without hesitation. The suite now runs in 12 minutes vs 38 minutes, and flake rate dropped from ~9% to ~1.5%.