Selenium HQ Reviews

I'm the company's managing director and we are customers of Selenium. 

 It enables us to handle some of the custom controls of Ajax calls to Selenium and Selenium Grid for parallel execution on different versions of the application and on different platform.

The Selenium stop control has been a challenge. We use auto IT for handling some of the small controls, small scenarios on the desktop, it needs to be improved with a configuration tool where it can handle desktop support as well as Ajax controls. Basically, there needs to be an improvement in handling the Ajax custom controls because the inbuilt method is not very helpful in that respect.

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

This is a stable and reliable solution for web applications, there is no doubt since it's an open-source tool, it's recommended for any web application. We used GitHub and Jenkins for continuous integration and everything is available online, we have experience working with the Jenkins version controls and configuration tools.

We use Google or blogs for any problems. There are sometimes delays and if we are moving into a new Chrome version or a new Firefox version, there can be delays of up to a couple of days to figure out the plugins and there's no immediate support available. We need to wait till something turns up on the internet. 

We've been using Selenium for a long time and haven't had many issues; we knew how to configure it. It's not completely straightforward and implementation takes time but everything was available on the internet and the blogs. There's a lot of documentation available regarding deployment. 

We're using the open source version. We don't have any support from Selenium HQ.

I would recommend this solution. If working on multiple browsers and on multiple platforms is the goal, then Selenium is definitely the right tool because it works on Windows as well as on Linux. It also supports multiple browsers. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We are using selenium in our organization for Unit Testing, Smoke Testing, Sanity Testing and Regression Testing.

Reduces Manpower, Testing is become much faster which is helpful for faster Project delivery. 

Selenium supports a range of languages, including Java, Perl, Python, C#, Ruby, Groovy, JavaScript, and more. It has its own script, but it is not limited by that language. It can work with various languages – whatever the developers/testers are comfortable with.

Selenium provides support across multiple browsers, namely, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. This becomes highly resourceful while executing tests and testing it across various browsers simultaneously.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The stability of the solution has been good, it is reliable we have not had any bugs till now.

I have not connected their technical support. However, there is a lot of community support for Selenium HQ online. If you look on internet you can find plenty of solutions for challenges you are facing.

The initial setup is little complicated the installation could be simplified.

I would recommend this solution to others.

Currently I am doing mobile application automation with Appium and Selenium, as well as front-end application automation with tools like WAVE for mobile and desktop applications. The only area that I'm not involved in at present is API testing, though I am hoping there will be opportunities to get to that as well in the future.

We typically use Selenium and Appium in automation and testing by first identifying which modules we are able to automate. Then, whenever we encounter some new course in the framework that we're using, and we need to use a hybrid kind of framework, we will use Selenium to resolve it. 

Selenium has improved the way we work because if you do what we need to do manually, you'll have to expend a lot of time. For example, it would be a huge chore to navigate through an application manually every day, and particularly if there's a new build on the way, you would have to check all the regulations over again by hand. That would simply take too much time, and so what Selenium does for us is that in one resource it can handle the work of three, four resources, provided that the scripts are straightforward and coded properly. That's the main cool thing about Selenium, I would say.

For me, the most valuable feature of Selenium lies in its ability to help us find elements quickly. Apart from that, the driver interface is really useful, too. When we implement the Selenium driver interface, we can easily navigate through all of the pages and sections of an app, including performing things like clicking, putting through SendKeys, scrolling down, tagging, and all the other actions we need to test for in an application.

One drawback to Selenium is that there is nothing like an object repository, such as that found in QTP, especially considering continuous integration practices that have become common nowadays. In future, if they can provide an object repository or some kind of repository for data, then that I would greatly appreciate it. For example, once you have the app credentials and all the other security data and you don't want to show them to other people who are not authorized, a repository for this kind of data would be very useful. You could then simply grant access to only those people who need it.

Another improvement I can think of is in the area of documentation and support. With Selenium, we're using freeware software, and because of this there is no support or anything from the vendor. In this case, you have to rely solely on your own coding experience and exposure to the tool, and you often have to search through many pages of code when you want to change something in your implementation. It also makes you rely on your problem-solving skills to a large degree, because some problems are not that easy to solve by yourself.

If I can compare Selenium with another solution such as SoapUI Pro, there's a big difference when it comes to coding your own solutions. With SoapUI Pro, if you want to fetch some data, you don't need to write any code or anything, and for someone with no coding experience, this makes it much easier to be able to use effectively. So, ultimately, more support for non-technical people would make for a great improvement in Selenium.

I have been using Selenium HQ for the last two to three years.

The stability of Selenium depends on the skill level of the team that is using it. If you are writing solid code for automating your scripts, then you will find that Selenium itself is a stable solution. But if you're writing sloppy code then you may find that Selenium slows down or becomes unstable. Truly, I think it all depends on the people who are using it, and how they approach the architecture of the framework.

I am hopeful that Selenium will scale well because, along with others nowadays, we plan to to move into cloud-based provisioning with continuous integration. We will be doing that with AWS, most likely.

I haven't taken any technical support till now because Selenium is freeware, and you will not be getting any technical support directly. So that could be something that they could work on because if they were able to provide support, it would great for us and many others. Without it, you can still add code to the Selenium software itself, but they won't be able to help you with it.

On the other hand, I do believe there is enough documentation online for anyone who wants to figure it out by themselves. There are videos, tutorials, and other resources available to us.

The setup of Selenium is easy, in my experience, since it is provided as JAR files that you can download. Apart from that, there is, I believe, an architectural approach where you can simply input your dependencies and it will automatically download all the JAR files needed, and other required files.

As for deploying the code, this is just as easy. For example, if you're working with some type of continuous integration, it's a breeze to deploy. First, you have to build up your framework, and then you can deploy it to Git, or GitHub, or anywhere you want. At this point it's just about uploading the code, so there's not much to it. 

I am currently implementing Selenium along with a few other tools. For example, for mobile device automation, I'm using Selenium with Appium. The Selenium architecture can be integrated with Appium in order to be able to automate with mobile devices such as Android and iOS, which is what I'm doing now. Beyond that, we also have desktop applications; for Windows we have EXE files and for Mac we have DMG files. With these, I have implemented the Windows application drivers using Selenium so that we're able to easily automate any Windows-based or Mac-based app.

As for the rest of the team who are implementing Selenium this way, we have about 15 people on the testing side of things, and 6 people in automation.

Selenium is free software so we do not pay licensing costs. 

My advice to others is that, first of all, you have to understand the process of automation from a general point of view, and how people get on with the coding and all that. If you only have manual experience, like a lot of new testers, then you likely don't have much experience in coding either. And in that case, my advice would be to first understand the logic of the process. For instance, before jumping into it from the deep end, try get a handle on a few small steps first, and as you go along you will learn the basic coding, the basic architecture, how Selenium works, how the automation process works, and so on.

Then, take a piece of code and ensure that it works as a standalone script, then finally jump into the framework. Develop from any framework, use it as best as possible, get some experience with it, and try to become an expert from there.

You can use any programming language you prefer. As for myself, I'm using Java, but you can use C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. There's a lot of support for different programming languages with Selenium. 

My biggest lessons while using Selenium have had to do with automation and how it really works, which is something I've always been interested in. Once I get an application, any application whether it be a WAVE app or mobile app, I very much enjoy getting stuck into the automation part of testing. And what I've learned is that not everything is that easy to automate.

In many cases, I have had to team up with new solutions and play around with code on my own, which has been a great learning experience for me. Apart from that, with Selenium I have been able to implement new things such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which is useful when you are not able to find all the elements you need, and I feel good that I was personally able to enhance the automation process with what I have learned along the way.

I would rate Selenium HQ an eight out of ten. 

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.

We work for a client who does HRM solutions. They wanted us to develop their scripts using Selenium HQ. Typically, we develop UI, API and database scripts. These are the three combinations we have used for them. So their test cases are typically where we initially do some operations on the various applications they have. Then, once the operation is done, we initiate a few API calls and then we validate the data in the database. This whole process of trying to enter into, listen into, and close is done using Selenium HQ. This is what we are doing. We have close to 8,000 test cases in the last three years.

What I like the most about this product is that it gives us a lot of freedom to code anything, there is no restriction on the type of function you can do. Typically, we use Java with it, and Java has a lot of libraries available online, and whatever you need you can just write the Java code for that part of the work and then you can do it. This includes, multi-technology, the UI database, API image based testing - it lets us do everything.

Selenium is good when the team is really technical because Selenium does less built-in methods. If it came with more built-in and pre-built methods it would be even easier for less technical people to work with it. That's where I think the improvement can be.

I would also like to see a good method for image based automation. That's what I believe is a very upcoming thing and is something that Selenium really lacks. The imagery is kind of an automation. It's more of an object decipher, so that's something I really want to see because most of the tools are moving in that direction.

I have been using Selenium HQ for three years.

It is stable, but one issue I see is that whenever there's a new version coming in, every three months or so, the current version changes and the new version of Selenium is not stable and then we have to wait for a week or so to get a patch for that.

We use Selenium HQ on a regular basis.

Overall there are around 20 people working on this just in my area, who are also responsible for delivery as well as maintenance.

On a similar previous project, we scaled it. We went ahead and integrated the continuous integration and Jenkins Pipeline with QA. It was pretty scalable. We were able to connect it to CID and we were able to connect it to JIRA.

In terms of customer support, it is more of a community support. There's a lot of small communities for Selenium HQ. I don't think Selenium HQ has official support. But there are a lot of communities. So typically we go to Stack Overflow and that kind of community where we just look for the support if we get stuck.

The initial setup was pretty easy. There is lot of online documentation and online help. Even if you get stuck somewhere it just takes a few searches to figure out the issue because there is good community support.

We were able to deploy and install this product all by ourselves without any extra help.

We tried MicroFocus UFT and we also evaluated Tosca. These are the two tools we evaluated along with HQ but we felt Selenium HQ was better for us.

The overall need for this project was that we were supposed to integrate across multiple technologies. When we started this project two years back we had to use API and a UI database. We were not allowed to use a lot of technologies. So we realized it would not be easy with other tools to combine three technologies in the same place since it's a different structure. This was not possible with UFT or Tosca. So that was one of the biggest reasons we chose Selenium HQ, because the whole project depended on that kind of a flow.

Additionally, there was the licensing issue. It was pretty costly at Tosca and MicroFocus UFT, whereas Selenium HQ is all open source and has a very good community support. So I think these are the two reasons we chose it.

My personal advice is that it is such an amazing tool to work on. The best thing about the tool is the community support. I don't think any other tool has that kind of a community support. You just post a question on any popular community, like Stack Overflow, and you get answers in like 20 minutes. There are so many people using it which makes life really easy. At the same time, you get a lot of free hands to work on. Meaning because it's based on Java which has so many open source libraries, you can use any library to do any kind of functionality you want. That's a pretty powerful tool. My advice if you get stuck somewhere, is to just put it on community and then you get your answer.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Selenium HQ an eight.

The primary use of this solution is UI testing.

This has improved our organization through the automation of UI test cases.

The most valuable feature is the Selenium grid, which allows us to run tests in parallel.

Selenium HQ easily integrates with other dependencies.

I would like to see XPath made more reliable so that it can be used in all browsers.

I have been using Selenium HQ for five years.

All the features in Selenium to automate the UI.

Reduced license cost

I've used it for four years.

There were issues.

There were issues.

There were issues.

5/10

5/10

Selenium Grid set-up is bit complex.

I would advise you that it's a good tool to automate UI. There have been issues in the product.

Selenium WebDriver and Selenium IDE are useful.

Selenium IDE is able to record and playback. It was useful for me when I did not know coding. Selenium WebDriver has got packages which help in automating test cases.

The best part of Selenium WebDriver is that it supports multiple web browsers, thus, helping in cross-browser testing.

It is free to use and is not limited to any scripting language.

It has helped our organization as automating the test cases is much easier and faster now. It covers a wide range of test cases and in many browsers.

Selenium has room for improvement as it does not support the tests and result-sharing in anything but a manual way.

I have been using it for six months now.

There were some stability issues with Selenium. Sometimes my tests were not stable.

I have scalability issues with Selenium.

I did not use any technical support other than the help from my colleagues.

I have used Tricentis Tosca before, but I find Selenium much better as it is an open source tool and free to use.

The initial setup wasn't easy as I didn't know what packages to use and which ones were useful for my project.

Pricing: It is free to use.

I would advise others to use Selenium WebDriver and to understand all the packages useful for their project.