Selenium HQ Reviews

I mainly use Selenium for web applications.

The most valuable features are ExpectedConditions, actions, assertions, verifications, flexible rates, and third-party integrations. I also like that it's an in-house solution, which means you're not dependent on any tool.

I find Selenium to be slow - its server takes a long time to interact with your browser and sometimes fails. It's also somewhat outdated, for example, it has no capacity to handle things like desktop pop-ups, does not support mobile testing, and has very limited reporting. In future releases, I would like Selenium to focus on headless execution when executing their test cases, using PhantomJS or Chrome Headless.

I have six years of experience with this solution.

There are issues with scalability in that it requires a technical person to perform it and takes a lot of time.

Selenium is open-source and has no technical support, but there is a big online community on platforms such as Stack Overflow who provide help for users.

I've previously used Node.js and Cypress.

Selenium is comparatively difficult to set up and requires technical knowledge in order to integrate and configure it. I developed a complete, fully-functional framework for this solution, which took around eight months to automate around 100 test cases.

In Selenium, you have to write extensive code - even if you want to automate one login scenario, you have to write a code of around 50 lines - which uses a disproportionate amount of man-hours. It takes such a long time to use this solution that it may be worth looking into other free solutions such as TestProject or Katalon Studio, or paid solutions to replace it.

Before implementing Selenium, I think it's very important to find out the maximum resusability of the code using the parameterized XPaths.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

In my current project, we are working with an online pharmacy system, and for this system we maintain prescription details for patients. For example, patient names and other details such as where the patients live, what medications they need, and other types of information for various scenarios.

Then there is information for the doctors, such as what prescriptions there are in the system, and from which doctors they have been prescribed. These are the types of scenarios and test cases that we are automating with Selenium.

Specifically, I have been using Eggplant Functional and the Java Selenium pack, and Selenium WebDriver is the driver we use for developing the automation and scripts for the different test cases we use. This is our main testing tool for the online pharmacy system project and it is deployed on the cloud on a virtual machine because we are working from home now.

Selenium HQ has helped us through its automation capabilities, because testing manually takes a lot of time and money. For instance, we have now automated an end-to-end application for the test cases. So now it's really easy for the testers, and it reduces the time and effort taken to do their work.

There are many phases that must be completed while delivering the product to the client, and in the system integration testing phase we can easily execute our automation and scripts, which saves us a lot of time and enhances the testing process dramatically.

There are many useful features in Selenium that I like, and of the new features I particularly enjoy the Selenium Grid. With this, we can run many test cases in one go, and in one suite we can extract multiple results.

Because Selenium also supports parallel test execution, I believe it is one of the best testing applications out there.

Beyond the many advantages that Selenium HQ brings, there are also several disadvantages. For example, there are some complex scripts which can make Selenium unreliable in some cases.

For email-based applications, we can't automate as we would like to, making it necessary to bring in a third-party product to do so. Eggplant, for example, offers email-based processing, like with the OCR engine, and for automation testing and reporting I would like to see a similar feature in Selenium.

I've been using Selenium HQ for at least one year now. 

I find it a reliable solution for the most part. But in some cases it is only as reliable as the third-party code it works alongside with. For example, Selenium doesn't have automated generation code, so we are dependent on other tools for this. And as I have mentioned, we also need to use third-party tools for things like email-based applications.

Selenium HQ can be scaled with the use of parallel test execution, and when it comes to expanding its use more generally, it's possible to add on to its automation functionality with third-party tools as well.

For our work with Selenium, we have a support team that helps us so we can go through them when we have problems. But for the small things, we generally solve problems ourselves. We are able to do self-study when it comes to support, and we also have a tech support architect who is able to help when needed.

The initial deployment was simple, as we are not doing anything too complex with it. We're using Azure DevOps for the deployment, so we test for that with a test plan and build up the pipeline accordingly, so we can execute and get the test execution report in order to find out what other test cases were impacted, and what other test cases we need to resolve. Doing it this way, we can easily find and fix any bugs in the deployment.

We have built up some custom implementation strategies when it comes to our daily use in Selenium HQ. For the test cases, we first verify which test cases we need to automate by coding some common functions, like logins and other common functions that are present in the application. After that, we look at the locators we will need to select using XPath, and then we start building the test cases according to the specific application, using code from all the common functions.

In the implementation team, we have six people who are using Selenium HQ for our current project. There are more people in other projects that I have running, but for this one there are only six of us. One or two are technical leads and the others are project engineers.

When it comes to maintenance of Selenium, we leave that up to others. We are mainly responsible for automating all the scripts that we deliver to the client.

Selenium HQ is open source and our use of it in our company is provided for free.

I would surely recommend others to use Selenium as we do, especially because while using Selenium we can use Java concepts as well. It's great that, through Java, anybody can use Selenium; even novice programmers. In today's market, automation is a big part of every organization, and Java programming skills can hugely enhance the use of tools like Selenium.

One of the biggest lessons I learned was during my time as part of the development team. I didn't want to work in the manual testing team and so when my development project was completed, I moved to the automation department because I wanted to carry on being productive. With this move, I realized that I could easily learn other tools and technologies that are useful in the market, by adapting my programming skills in Java, Python, or any other programming language, to working with tools such as Selenium. In addition to my Selenium work, I also now do Rapid Automation as an automation engineer.

I would rate Selenium HQ an eight out of ten.

Depending upon the functionality, I use Selenium to prepare the scenarios I'm doing. I start by writing automation scripts in Java. From there, we execute the scripts if there are any changes in the product. Then we upgrade this overnight along with Jenkins to make sure our application is running as expected. They feature continuous deployment and continuous integration with the help of our teams, so our product will be applied to more users once it's adequately tested.

Selenium is the fastest tool compared to other competitors. It can run on any language, like Java, Python, C++, and .NET. So we can test any application on Selenium, whether it's mobile or desktop. And if I build some framework on Selenium, I can give it to someone else. Then they can use it and start going further. One more thing is that you can implement any framework on it, like TestNG, Cucumber, JUnit, etc.

Selenium should implement more islands for a desktop feature. My laptop and desktop have a calibrator or some other desktop applications. We can automate those things through Selenium, so they should be adding them in the subsequent versions. For now, I guess Selenium could add some other features like object communications for easy expansion. 

I've been using Selenium HQ for about five years.

So performance-wise, Selenium is the best tool so far. It has the fastest automating tools.

We run scenarios at midnight or around that time and split this application into virtual machines. So during that time, the application is executed in panel mode. Let's say I have 10 vital missions in the Google Cloud Platform. These things will be triggered automatically and executed in each of the machines. And it has a balancing load concept, so if one machine is at capacity, it will automatically move to a second machine for the other scenarios. So there is never an issue with scalability. We have more than 1,000 employees in the company using it every day to develop scripts. 

Because Selenium HQ is open source, we don't have a customer service team or technical support, so we have to search on our own for answers. When I've had problems in the past,I've had to Google to see if it's an application issue or a Selenium issue. Without any help from vendors, it's difficult to automate some things like CAPTCHA. But still, we have a framework that is ready for this. So with the help of this framework and importing those library files, we can make our own way. 

At my previous company, we used a UFT tool called Micro Focus UFT. We used this because it was a different kind of use case where we had to transfer our publications back and forth between the mainframe and the mobile application. So we have to format that, which is why we used the UFT.

Setting up SeleniumHQ isn't that complex. We like to develop our application in Pega and have a point cloud that we deploy on Google Cloud. It is developed and tested with Jenkins, which is a continuous integration tool. Once the code is specific to Jenkins, we trigger Selenium and execute the scenarios. After this finishes, we move everything to cloud. 

Along with this docker, there is a deployment phase in Google Cloud, where the images of our application are moved to pre-production. Pre-production is something like a replica of production that allows the users to work on it. So once it is transferred to pre-production, the users will work for one week or one or two. If they are satisfied, we move on to production.

Deployment usually requires about eight to ten people. Most of the work is done by technicians who are akin to database administrators. They take this on for one month a year every year. Their job is mostly to minimize the weight of the application. In the next phase, DevOps engineers deploy the enviornment. The time for deployment depends on the teams and the tasks. If there is a small change, it may have taken between half an hour and an hour. On the other hand, if there is a significant upgrade of the application, it may take eight to ten hours. Generally, we don't need any maintenance unless a UR application has changed.

Selenium is free. Anyone can use it without paying anything.

I rate SeleniumHQ seven out of 10. When you're choosing a solution, it depends upon the type of applications you are using in your project. If you have only have desktop and mobile, go for Selenium. However, if you have multiple applications like Windows-based applications, a virtual machine-based application, or a mainframe .NET application, I suggest going with another tool, like Tosca UFT.

We are still testing Selenium HQ.

The client is based in the U.S. They process the code checking, and we work on the script.

When we get storage or requirements for manual testing, we begin the automation once it is stabilized.

We work in the healthcare domain.

If for example, I get a diagnosis for a particular patient, it continuously changes as there are at least 100 sets of data. It's impossible to make that work for each and every build manually. The parameterization and parallelization have helped us with the inputting. 

Every week we have reviews. We have automated the stabilized areas. It has helped us to add speed to our cycles.

Data parametrization and parallelization are the most important features in any automation tool.

Speed is very important for continuous integrations and deployments. The team gets more time to focus on other new areas.

The configuration of different data sets is also very important.

With Selenium, it is an open-line, I can integrate at any time, from anywhere.

There are some network issues, as the line is not very clear.

There are some areas that need improvement. I continuously see failures in threads when it  is running in parallel. 

I find that it fails, especially when I use APM automation on the mobile side. I have experienced these issues, and since the APM is also based on the Selenium pack.

It is a challenge to locate them, or knowing the location of the unique elements on the APM application. I don't see many issues with the Web applications but there are several with the APM.

As an open-source solution, there is no dedicated support.

Extending functions on the codes would be very helpful.

I have been working with Selenium WebDriver for four to five years but in the last year, it has been working mostly on the functional testing.

There are some issues with the stability of Selenium HQ.

In terms of scalability, we don't use many distributed systems. It is for a limited number of users. We have one lead architect and three senior QAs.

We don't deal with technical support. Our clients handle that on their end, but there is no direct technical support.

I have some experience with Selenium WebDriver and Rest Assured API automation. 

In regards to mobile automation, we use Appium.

Six months ago, I work on Selenium NUnit.

Clear instructions were provided to complete the installation. It was very straightforward. There were no issues when installing this solution.

APM setups are a bit more of a challenge. It takes longer to set up APM.

There were no issues in the installation of WebDriver. From the end-to-end process to deployment, to the automation code.

We have one dedicated assigned person for continuous integration and deployment. We check in with him before we complete any code. We provide him with our test and script, and the integration is done with him present to avoid any issues.

Selenium is open-source. There are no licensing fees with Selenium.

We are currently evaluating functional testing tools, both manual and automation testing.

We are looking for codeless automation with support for codeless automation.

In my evaluations, I have seen that some are tools are lacking.

I have worked full-fledged on Selenium WebDriver along with the multi-tenancy for the JavaScript framework.

I have hands-on experience with the Selenium framework, and I also worked on, API for APA automation Currently I am working in the healthcare domain.

In my opinion, it is a complete end-to-end solution.

As of now, it's for only web APIs. It provides a complete solution. 

I don't see that it's many disadvantages, except when doing the coding. A person should have perfect coding skill sets. If they don't have a coding skillset, it's a little difficult for them to get started. 

We had completed multiple POCs to present to our clients.

It was pretty straightforward for me. I didn't experience a lot of difficulties getting into Selenium. If your framework with Selenium is good, then it gives you the correct output.

I would rate Selenium an eight out of ten.

My customer previously validated every file and it would take almost 15-20 minutes for a document. They used to randomly select and test only 100 out of the thousands, maybe 85,000, files, to pick up sampling. Each file would take around 20 to 25 minutes, so we were not able to do it manually, but with the help of Selenium, we were able to test all the files in two days. It saves a lot of time.

Selenium HQ is open source, which is one thing that I like about it. Whatever you want to find, it's already there. If you'd like to add some features, you can. You can also contribute to it. Whatever problems we face, we can go and add. It is most like Eggplant, which is a paid tool, but here we don't have to pay for anything.

In terms of what could be improved, there are some glitches with it, but whenever you report it, the open source community works on it and fixes it. There is no support here. If I say in the user community that it's not working, I have to go and check Openstack and extract questions and answers from the community. There is not any company that is supporting it that could help me. There is no particular documentation about it that can help me in a technical way. I would have to see people's user experience and see what they have done in such and such scenarios.

Sometimes we face challenges with Selenium HQ. There are third party tools that we use, for example for reading the images. They are not easy to plug in. The third party add-ons are difficult to get good configuration and do not have good support. I would like to see better integration with other products.

In the next release, I would like OCR, image recognition, to be built-in. Sometimes there are no code elements that are detectable so finding x paths is tough. Whenever there are some challenges here, we could use OCR or something similar, with good image recognition.

I have been using Selenium HQ for the last couple of months.

Selenium HQ's scalability depends on the modularity of the product. Our product was more modular. When we made the product testable for one document, we were able to test 20,000 documents with it. So the scalability was quite impressive.

We have three people in the testing team who are using it.

We are considering expanding usage. Since it has reduced the business time, there are new scenarios that other business teams were using it for. So they asked us to include those scenarios as well, reducing the time.

There is no tech support because it's open source in Selenium.

You just have to raise the bugs in the community and if someone has time, they can fix it. So it's not so quick.

The initial setup was straight forward. We don't use it in deployment, we just use Selenium for testing in our organization. The code which was deployed was tested before.

There are four developers in my team who are working on it.

It was not a Selenium deployment because the deployment was of code, and we only use Selenium for testing purposes. We did not deploy with Selenium code anywhere on production.

In terms of pricing, it is open source, so we don't have to pay anything for Selenium.

My advice to anyone considering using Selenium is that using their libraries is good but the focus should be on finding the elements. Element location is a tough part. There are plugins that are available so don't waste time creating your own locators. You can use ready-made built-in solutions that would reduce your time a lot.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Selenium HQ a six.

We basically use Selenium for smoke testing and regression testing. We don't use it much for functional testing because you can easily and manually use a bunch of tests and make them a Zephyr. We use Zephyr as our test case management tool, which is a kind of a plugin for JIRA. So, we create our test cases in Zephyr, and then they are tagged to be automated. After that, we put them into our regression suite. Each team has its own independent regression suite. Currently, my team has a couple hundred, but I know some teams have 500 or 600 in their suite. We also have a suite of smoke tests that we run through Selenium.

All the code is on-prem. We're currently just running the tests through the Jenkins pipeline, but we want to be able to run them in parallel in the cloud and a lot quicker. We are not quite there yet. 

When we execute our smoke test, we're able to perform them really quickly with Selenium. Currently, in our project, we have 12 smoke tests. If I have to run them sequentially, it is going to take half an hour. If I run them in parallel, each one of them takes less than two and a half minutes. So, I could do smoke tests in under three minutes and get feedback right away about whether everything is up and running. We do production deployments throughout the week, but we try to do our main deployments on Sunday. Sunday is not the best working day, but because it is a weekend, we can get our work done. We want to be able to perform these tests quickly. The same is applicable to our pre-prod environment. We can run our smoke test right away, and it will be able to tell us that all the dependencies for our applications are up and running. As compared to doing it manually, which can take a few hours, it is really quick. 

It saves time for regression testing. It takes about three people to do the regression testing manually for probably two or three hours, whereas you can do it a lot quicker if you can get them in parallel. So, you can get quick feedback about whether your application is up and running right away. You don't want to go down the road where you find a problem after four or five hours. You want to find it out as quickly as possible.

Its biggest advantage is that it is very customizable.

It saves time and enables us to execute our smoke test and regression tests really quickly.

We have a lot of inheritance going here. I've been doing it for so long, so it is pretty straightforward for me, but you have to know Java to be able to work in our framework. I know some people use Python, but you have to know Java. That's kind of the hardest thing when you're doing interviews. People just don't know Java. This is where probably Worksoft has an advantage because it is codeless. So basically, you are just pointing, clicking, and providing things like Excel spreadsheets for your test data. In that sense, if you are using Worksoft, it is a lot easier to train or onboard somebody.

We use X path for our selectors, and sometimes, it is difficult to create locators for elements. It is very time-consuming because they're embedded deeply. A lot of that comes from the way that you architect your page. If devs are putting the IDs on their elements, it is great, and it allows you to get those elements super fast, but that's not necessarily the case. So, Selenium should be able to get your elements a lot quicker. Currently, it is time-consuming to get your selectors, locate your locators, and get to the elements. You have to find the element on the page, and then you have to go to the page and the console. In the console, you can put the next path in there to locate the element manually in the JavaScript to say that this one will work, and let's use this because we'll put a string of that element. After that, we get the element based on that stream. That's probably the most time-consuming part of that. It is dependent on how well you've designed the front-end UI. We use something called Data Tests attribute through which we can locate elements super fast. If people consistently use those, that's great, but a lot of times when they go in there to fix some bugs, they're not consistent in doing that. They usually just find a way to locate the element and change that in the code. If you change something, then your code or your test is going to fail because the locator has changed the element, and you can't get it anymore. You have to manage a way to get it. So, when you're running your suite of tests and you see some failures, it takes some research to find out why did this paneling go, and then you find out that it happened because of the frontend change. Someone removed this element and changed it, and you have to change your locator, which is very time-consuming. It is kind of like a false belt. It is failing, but it is not. It is only failing because of your locator. It is not failing because the app is not functioning correctly. It is a kind of false failure. Sorting the elements quicker would be a big thing with Selenium.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

We have a dozen teams at our company, and each one of them is independent. We give them a pretty extensive Selenium framework, and then they basically start building based on that architecture and create their test cases and page objects.

In terms of its usage, Selenium is our testing framework. We use Jenkins to perform our test cases. A lot of them are done through a pipeline, and a lot of them are queued on to run automatically. There are triggers in there to run something every day at 9:00 AM. We don't have to manually say that we want to test this aspect of our page. 

The excellence team now has four people, and that's just the team that manages the framework. There are 25 people who can do test automation. They do manual tests and automation. They use the same framework, and if they find some issues, they'll ask us. If they're constantly having to do a certain function and having to write the Selenium code for it, they will ask us to do that. We might create a tool inside the framework to make their life quicker. We can put it inside the common Selenium framework so that it is always available to everybody.

Selenium is an open-source solution. If you have a problem, you can pretty much Google something and figure out a solution for it. There are so many people who are using it, and there is a lot of material that is available out there for you to troubleshoot any kind of problems.

You don't usually directly go to the open-source code. I don't visit it at all nowadays. In the beginning, I did do it a lot, but not so much now. We're now in a state where we are just executing test cases and creating new ones. It does everything we need and meets our needs.

It has been Selenium for me from the get-go. I've been here at XPO for almost five years. Before that, I was more of a contractor, and I did a couple of contracts. When I went to a healthcare company, they really didn't have a great framework. So, I started one, but I doubt that they're still using it. That's because it requires a lot of knowledge to be able to create a framework.

It is something that I've been always using. I've done some research on some other tools to be able to do things, but I always come back to Selenium. 

We're an angular-based house, and all our pages are in angular. There are some other products that run on top of JavaScript besides Selenium. There are quite a few people out there who are using Protractor, which is an end-to-end type of test framework, but it works specifically for angular applications. We have never gone down that path. We just stuck with Selenium.

When I first came here, the framework was in place, but it was more basic. There is a team of three guys here, and we're all pretty smart. We're the excellence team for the framework. We've done a lot to make it a lot simpler for us to create our test cases. Three people probably worked 25% of the time for a few years on it. So, a lot of time was invested into the framework, and it has come a long way. It is much more sophisticated now.

Maintaining the architecture and Selenium framework for testing requires work. It is an ongoing kind of process. We're constantly maintaining it and updating it.

It is all free.

Each product has its own pros and cons. It is very customizable, but then you have to have a lot of knowledge about Java or an object-oriented programming language that works with it. They keep creating frameworks to make your life easier, and it is a very customizable framework, but you have to have the knowledge to be able to do it. There are other tools out there, such as Worksoft, for which you don't have to know Java.

If you're starting from scratch, it would be good to get a good Java developer and make him or her get everybody up and going. That Java developer can train junior test automation people. You should hold on to that person for as long as you can. Getting a good Java person is probably critical when you're creating your Selenium framework.

It is not the easiest thing because it is hard to get a quality assurance resource that is knowledgeable about Java. So, it is very difficult to get a good framework in place. Usually what happens is that you'll get QA people who start doing QA, and then they start doing test automation. Once their skills get up there in Java where they're decent, they move over to being a software developer. So, they get out of the QA world, and they go over to be a developer. So, you lose that talent. You had to do your framework, and now they're gone. Maintaining good talent is difficult. It is hard enough to maintain the Selenium framework, and when you start losing people, it makes it harder. The next person comes in line, and it is just a revolving door. 

I would rate Selenium HQ an eight out of 10 because it is not perfect, but it is the best tool out there to do automated testing.

We are using SeleniumHQ for automating the test scripts.

What I like the most is that it is fast. When comparing, it faster than HQ QTP.

It supports multiple processes, which is great.

Just by changing a line of code, it will work with multiple processes.

The locating of web elements is a complex process where you require the WebDriver application and create a locator by using  By Class. They are not always matching.

It would be better to have a simplified way to locate and identify web elements.

Another negative point is that you cannot delete the application, you can only delete the web application.

I have been using this solution for six months.

This solution has been stable. We have not experienced any issues with bugs or glitches.

Selenium HQ does not offer proper support. As a free solution, it doesn't offer proper support. You have to search for some blogs.

The initial setup was fine. It didn't seem to be complex.

The difficulty was with the web interface and finding the objects. I have to inspect elements and this times time.

I am still in training but will improve in the next few months.

It's an open-source tool that you can work with at any time without any cost.

I am at the beginner's level, working alone to get some more practice. It will take some time to have more experience with this solution.

Micro Focus is more user-friendly, and they offer paid support.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Selenium HQ for web automation. We are using C Sharp for development.

Using Selenium HQ helps us by executing tests quickly. It saves us time and reduces the need for manual testing of repetitive tasks, thereby reducing efforts.

The most valuable features of Selenium HQ are that it is free and allows using any programming language. Additionally, it supports different frameworks that are suitable for various projects.

There is a challenge with concurrent testing, where parallelization is not fully supported. Sequential tests depending on each other cannot be executed in parallel. This feature could be improved.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

The stability of the product is good. There are no major issues.

The scalability rating would be around a seven to eight out of ten. There are still challenges with parallelization and testing.

There is enough help available online. Simple questions and repetitive tasks have a lot of available resources. However, finding help for customized scenarios can be challenging.

Positive

The setup process was simple. I managed to complete it by myself.

There are many products that depend on Selenium HQ. Protractor is one of them.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use the product for mobile and API testing purposes.

Selenium's open-source nature is a key advantage. Its extensive support for diverse web technologies. We can combine it with APM for mobile, API, and web testing.

They should leverage the tools for supporting Windows apps. Additionally, they could add more customization features for reporting.

We have been using Selenium HQ as partners for nine years.

The product is stable. However, it is impacted by the changes in UI. I rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We manage Selenium HQ for 20 customers. It is a scalable product and suitable for small to medium enterprises. It needs improvement in terms of supporting Windows devices.

I rate the scalability a seven or eight.

It is an open-source solution, and thus, we do not receive direct support services. We refer to relevant documentation and community articles to resolve most issues.

The initial setup for mobile app testing, especially when installing simulators, is complicated. Configuring simulators for Android and iOS platforms is time-consuming due to trial and error. Setting it up for mobile automation takes approximately one to two weeks. However, for web automation, the process is comparatively straightforward. It takes less than an hour to complete.

I rate the process a seven out of ten.

It is an open-source solution.

It's crucial for technicians to thoroughly evaluate whether the solution aligns with the end-to-end application needs, especially considering the complexity of enterprise applications. For leveraging features like ERP integration or mobile testing, it is better to understand the compatibility and support for specific devices.

I rate Selenium HQ a seven out of ten.

I use Selenium HQ to create automated scripts for automated applications.

Since Selenium HQ has multiple plug-ins, we can use it with multiple tools and multiple languages.

I rate Selenium HQ a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Selenium HQ a nine out of ten for scalability.

The level of ease to set up Selenium HQ is medium. You need to have experience in order to do the initial setup.

Selenium HQ is a free, open-source solution.

Selenium HQ is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Selenium HQ a nine out of ten.