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 · seleniumbase-common-sites-v1-20260524
adapter: seleniumbase.Driver.get
| Target | Result | Detail | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| amazon.comamazon_search_laptop | pass | status 200 | 1.9 s |
| walmart.comwalmart_search_laptop | fail | block marker: “Robot or human” | 996 ms |
| ebay.comebay_search_laptop | fail | expected content missing | 123 ms |
| aliexpress.comaliexpress_search_laptop | fail | block marker: “Robot” | 4.6 s |
| target.comtarget_search_laptop | pass | status 200 | 3.0 s |
| booking.combooking_search_paris | fail | expected content missing | 380 ms |
| airbnb.comairbnb_search_paris | fail | block marker: “captcha” | 3.1 s |
| tripadvisor.comtripadvisor_restaurants_paris | fail | block marker: “captcha” | 639 ms |
| expedia.comexpedia_hotels_paris | fail | expected content missing | 913 ms |
| zillow.comzillow_homes_for_sale | fail | expected content missing | 847 ms |
| realtor.comrealtor_new_york | fail | expected content missing | 1.1 s |
| rightmove.co.ukrightmove_london | pass | status 200 | 3.7 s |
| indeed.comindeed_python_remote | fail | block marker: “Cloudflare” | 98 ms |
| yelp.comyelp_sf_restaurants | fail | block marker: “captcha” | 528 ms |
| trustpilot.comtrustpilot_amazon | fail | expected content missing | 441 ms |
| newyork.craigslist.orgcraigslist_nyc_bike | fail | block marker: “blocked” | 412 ms |
| finance.yahoo.comyahoo_finance_aapl | fail | redirected to consent.yahoo.com | 1.1 s |
| coinmarketcap.comcoinmarketcap_home | fail | block marker: “captcha” | 1.5 s |
| reddit.comreddit_webscraping | fail | expected content missing | 443 ms |
| youtube.comyoutube_search_scraping | fail | block marker: “captcha” | 1.9 s |
| en.wikipedia.orgwikipedia_web_scraping | pass | status 200 | 633 ms |