SeleniumBase
Beats Playwright on Amazon, fails murkier everywhere else.
SeleniumBase wraps Selenium with a large convenience and stealth toolbox. We ran 4.49.2 through its Driver API against the 21-site corpus, no proxy, headless.
It passed 4 of 21 — Amazon, Target, Rightmove, Wikipedia. Amazon is notable: both Playwright and Patchright drew 503s there the same day. Whatever SeleniumBase's driver does differently, one hard target noticed the difference.
The concerning pattern is how it failed. Seven targets — eBay, Booking, Expedia, Zillow, Realtor, Trustpilot, Reddit — didn't return clean block signals; they returned pages missing the expected content. Half-loaded results are the worst failure mode for a scraper because they can look like success to naive pipelines. Indeed served a Cloudflare interstitial, Yahoo the consent wall, and the captcha sites their usual checks. Getting trustworthy results out of SeleniumBase on hard sites means per-site waits and content assertions.
Test conditions
21 real public sites (public-tough-v1), 2026-05-24, no proxy, single residential IP, Linux. Deterministic validators: expected status code plus required and forbidden content markers. Pass rates measure the tool and the network position together. Without a proxy, results reflect how each site's protections treat one plain residential connection as much as the tool itself.
What worked
- +Passed Amazon search where Playwright and Patchright both failed on the same day.
- +Target, Rightmove, and Wikipedia rendered and passed cleanly.
- +Mature ecosystem with many built-in evasion and convenience options we haven't yet exercised (UC mode variants, etc.).
What failed
- −Seven of seventeen failures were half-loaded pages with missing content rather than clean refusals — ambiguous results that require your own validation layer.
- −Cloudflare interstitial on Indeed; captcha walls on Walmart, AliExpress, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Yelp, CoinMarketCap, YouTube.
- −Headless without a proxy, its extra machinery bought only one extra pass over stock Playwright.
When to use it
When its specific tricks (undetected-driver modes, form/flow helpers) match your target, and you're prepared to write content assertions for every page. Not a set-and-forget stealth solution.
Real capabilities, murky failure modes — verify everything it returns.
Run evidence
Every attempt below is backed by saved artifacts: request/response metadata, body content, and (for browsers) screenshots. Raw JSON and artifacts live in the runner data directory.
Run data not available in this build.