Selenium HQ Reviews

We took Selenium for web product test automation and as it very well suits as it has capacity to execute in different browser, different environment. Also it has lot other capacities to scale up test automation and yield better ROI.

Web-based application automation are mostly done using Selenium. It's the right automation tool as a replacement for manual regression testing that indispensably reduces the testing time due to its cross-browser, parallel, and remote executions.

- Most importantly, it is an open source tool.

- Parallel executions (same browser in parallel, different browser in parallel).

- Remote executions using Node and Hub.

- Integration with CI tools like Jenkins

- Multi-platform support (for details have a look at http://www.seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.jsp).

- Cross-browser Support (Chrome, Firefox, different versions of IE, Safari, Opera).

- Supported environments are Windows, Linux & Mac.

- Supports different scripting languages (JAVA, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Objective C, Javascript).

- Huge user community.

It has extensive support for Chrome and Firefox, but more is needed for IE, Edge and Safari.

To some extent it is unstable while executing against different versions of IE browser, but that could be overcome through some work-around and framework design. Edge browser executions are not stable as IE browsers.

Obviously, we have better support from various users as it is an open source tool. We have a huge number of customers in the open community at different levels to provide support.

Basically, to start with setup is straightforward and easier. If you use the remote web-driver, it is slightly complex to make the setup.

Our in-house team is used for the entire implementation of the framework. Being open-source, lot of valuable additions are made in a free-flow while developing the framework.

It's an open source tool.

When using Selenium WebDriver you will find that most valuable feature is integration with other technologies and frameworks.

Selenium can test almost any kind of web application and it supports many types of technologies. You can write scripts in various programming languages (Java, C#, Ruby, Python...).

Another important feature is scalable remote execution platform, you can execute your tests in parallel on great number of different machines using Selenium grid.

If used in right way (you can build your own test automation framework) it provides great test automation coverage and boosts time spent on writing automated test scripts. It can cope with almost any commercial tool in test automation area.

It would be nice to see more frequent releases and more bug fixes. Selenium has good support, but sometimes it seems that they mark some issues to easily with "won't fix" label.

Internet Explorer webdriver has some issues and should have better support.

I've been using it for one and half year, and intensely for the last eight months.

I encountered some smaller stability issues, but most of the time it can be solved quickly. There are also some minor issues with parallel test executions but there are workarounds for this specific cases so it can be avoided.

Support is pretty good, I would rate it 7/10.

I used a few commercial solutions in my career and Selenium offered me (almost) everything that this products did, in some cases even more. I chose it because it's open source, easy to integrate with other technologies/tools and offers everything that automation testing team needs.

Initial setup is complex just as any other development project setup is. Selenium has no installation files, it's just a bunch of libs which you need to import in your favorite IDE and set it up. It really depends on your experience, but no, it's not that complex.

It's an open source product, (probably) the most popular one in a whole software test automation industry. Although it's free and open source it has good support and great integration with different technologies.

If you have a good QA team with engineers which have strong technical background and experience in software development I would definitely recommend you Selenium WebDriver. It offers everything you need, you can make your own framework and architecture, based on your business and technical needs.

If you have non-technical QA team and you want test automation - Selenium WebDriver is not the right solution, you should invest in some commercial products which are easier to use and don't demand that level of technical skills from your team.

Our company is a customer of Selenium and I work in QA.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is Web Scraping although overall I think every single feature of Selenium is valuable because it's purely API so we can integrate it with any other tool.

In terms of improvement, I think there could be additional readability and abstraction in the solution, similar to the way other frameworks function. The solution could possibly use a more generic framework with more machine learning. If the community or IT companies had the budget, they might be able to work on that but it would definitely improve the solution, particularly in areas such as image comparison and image recognition. Machine learning capability would enable a self-healing capability in terms of locators. Selenium is not a magician, you need to provide instructions in order for it to identify any element in the web. That would really be an advantageous feature. Jason Arbon, CEO at test.ai, demonstrated this in Appium, which derives from Selenium. 

I'd also like to see a one-click install package. For now, I have to use TestNG, then Java, and then build them back. That could be simplified. 

I've been using this solution for almost five years. 

It's a pretty stable solution but we have to be careful and make sure we're using what has been released. We need to know which version to use and make sure it's the latest one so we know it will be stable. 

We are a small setup so have four or five users in the company. I've worked in bigger companies where thousands have used the solution on a daily basis, so it's very scalable. 
It's not the solution that deals with scalability, it's the cloud or a virtual system that enables scaling. If there are 1,000 test cases that I want to commute in an hour, then sometimes the reports can be messy.

We use Selenium forums most of the time and we get most of our answers from there. There are multiple people online providing answers. Selenium does provide a service but we don't use it because we are self-sufficient in that respect.

I have used Coded UI from Microsoft, which I believe will be deprecated some time this year. That was a very good solution. Before that, I also used HP QTP. Both of those are easier solutions than Selenium but also quite expensive. 

The very first setup several years ago was quite complex, nowadays it is simple. Generally we use Maven, so it is simply importing and doing the setup. If I already know the settings, it can be deployed within half an hour. It depends on the system configuration so there can be issues sometimes. Setup can easily be done internally and if there are good community people there could be a one-stop solution layer where installation is one click. Maintenance is only required when there are updates or API changes. 

The solution requires good understanding of Python, Pearl or Java and it's important to use the documentation. It would take a few hours of watching video sessions or reading the documentation to get started. It also helps to have an understanding of how API works, the architecture and how Selenium interacts with browsers. Having the background helps to design something with more features. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.  

We primarily use the solution for automation testing.

Nowadays we are using the solution to allow old solutions to run through it. This way, we don't need to go check functionalities created previously. We just run the automation. In just one click you run the automations through. It saves a lot of time and allows us to focus on other things.

The solution is very flexible; there are different ways of using it. It's open-source and has a lot of support on offer. 

It's excellent for analysis automation testing.

You can use the solution on many different browsers as well.

The solution need to  offer up much more information in regard to performance testing using selenium.

The solution is very scalable. You just have to have an understanding of how you are going to use it before you proceed. We do plan to increase usage in the future.

Technical support is very good; I'd rate it seven or eight out of ten.

We also use ReadyAPI alongside Selenium. We're working to integrate the two to have an overall more powerful performance.

The initial setup was straightforward, however, it does depend on what the organization's requirements are. Deployment can take up to one or two months.

The solution is open-source; you don't have to pay a licensing fee.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

It is an open-source solution and you are able to build vertically. There is also lots of support pertaining to Selenium such as videos on YouTube. It's very easy to integrate on different platforms.

The solution is constantly being updated and advanced; it's very reactive and in a constant state of change. 

I'd rate it seven out of ten.

The ability to test on all of the major web browsers.

I’ve used Selenium in multiple ways of the years. In one case I was working on a web site that got updated once a week. Mostly by others. Every week we would find out that a page changed that we were not expecting because we had changed included content, not knowing it was appearing on another page. I convinced management to allow me to write a script that went to each page on the production site and compare the page to the stage site. I reported the changes to management so that if they didn’t know about them, they were aware of the change.

On another site, we used Selenium to do basic application level testing. Just about the time I would start to think I was wasting my time, the test would reveal a problem that needed to be addressed.

Can’t think of anything I would change.

I've used it for at least five years.

There's never been an issue with deploying it.

As the various browsers change, tests stop working. But that can hardly be blamed on Selenium. Every problem I've ever had has always been answered by “Get the most recent version of Selenium.”

I've never had a problem scaling the tests.

It is open source, I don’t think this applies. The documentation could use some work but there are books that fill this hole.

I had used TestComplete at one point a very long time ago. What I didn’t like about TC is that it was a complete development environment, which I didn’t really like. Selenium gives me the ability to write my test using the programming environment I am already familiar with.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, but when you branch into using the Selenium Grid, things do get a bit more complex. It is all pretty easy now that I know how.

I implemented it myself using search engines and trial and error.

It’s free. And relatively easy to get setup.

Learn how to use the “Page Model” approach to creating tests. If you code direct to the Selenium API and don’t using the Page Model, as things change in your web application, it will become more and more difficult to update your test to reflect the changes.

It allows us to verify user flows effectively and very easily. I can use any web browser to assert user flows.

It's helped us get good coverage with functional regression tests, reducing the reduction of manual effort to sign off on every release. We can now do so in just one day to sign off a regression test as compared to 4 day before we had automated tests.

Plus, as the regression runs are invoked on every commit, the tool has also reduced the number of issues introduced by regressions and has highlighted the regression issues on every commit/push. This allows us to get very early fixes and reduces the risks associated with changes and releases.

Overall, there aren't any areas for improvement. However, there are some things you have to do make make effective use of the tool. Make sure the language you select to work with is the same as the language your applications is developed in. Also, make sure you use Selenium Grid to get the test and suites to run in parallel.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Stability has been fine for us.

It scales without issue.

It's open source, so there's no customer service.

It's customer service, so we provide our own technical support.

I like that it is a robust and free open source. There is a lot of community support available, and there are a lot of developers using them. There's good community support.

In terms of improvement, there should be standardized frameworks, which do not exist. Currently, you have to first sit down and look inward. This function is provided by some tools like Katalon.

There should be standardized frameworks to build automation.

I have been using Selenium for five to six years. 

We also use Sauce Labs. We do testing on various versions of browsers, and various operating systems for Android and Apple. So Sauce Labs provided that capability, where we can easily scale up our testing to test on various versions.

The scalability and stability are quite good. It is easily scalable. With a few pieces of code, it's scalable.

We have interacted on the Selenium forums a couple of times but never contacted the technical support.

We also use Sauce Labs.

We set up the entire framework around how the tests would be and different class structures. Then we evaluated how to construct labs and how to title execution and stuff like that. It took us good four to five months of two or three people working on it, to set up a robust framework.

If you are using it for the automation test, automation is generally good. If you have an experienced developer, it will be really good to deploy the open-source frameworks for Selenium.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

Not a ten because they don't come loaded with the frameworks or different framework options. You have to build it from scratch. The build-in comes with a lot of networks and libraries and stuff. You still need to build that framework before you start writing the code

They try to come up with new features. I think they're in a very good space.

Selenium web driver - Java.

As traditional load testing we use some expensive tools available in the market, but with the help of Selenium we started automating the browser and done load testing for light application.

Handling frames and windows needs to be improved.

I've been using it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10

Straightforward by using Selenium IDE.

We did an in-house implementation, doing our R&D over the internet.

Hot tool in market. Makes thing easier to use and implement. Demand increases cost.

Since it is an open source. It is free to use. However my company see it as the future of load testing.

You'll have a lot to do when automating many different applications. Just practice.