Automated testing is becoming a necessity for building and maintaining applications. Using automated testing reduces costs and labor, and simplifies many manual testing processes, ensuring testers achieve higher test coverage and deliver applications quickly and without flaws.
The Selenium testing framework is the go-to framework for automated testing. Consider taking Selenium Training in Chennai to enhance your skills and understanding. However, there are many alternatives available on the market.
These different frameworks fill many gaps that come with using Selenium, whether you are looking to make your testing process more accessible and efficient or satisfy various tasks that Selenium cannot address.
So, if you are looking for a new test automation framework, you may want to consider these five options to replace or go alongside Selenium in your testing strategy.
1. Cypress
Cypress has become one of the most popular Selenium alternatives. This framework is a JavaScript test automation solution, allowing developers and test automation engineers to develop JavaScript-based web test automation scripts. Cypress continues to attract new clients and users as the go-to test automation alternative. As well as being a developer-focused platform, Cypress offers impressive scalability, a growing community of users, and reliable documentation.
Cypress may have fewer integrations than the Selenium framework, but it does allow for a more streamlined execution environment. While Cypress acts as an alternative, testers can use both frameworks alongside each other, complimenting their existing test scripts and increasing test coverage and scalability.
2. Cucumber
Cucumber is another popular Selenium alternative. However, there are many notable differences between both solutions. For instance, Selenium is an automation tool designed for web applications, while Cucumber is intended for automated behavior-driven development (BDD) solutions. Selenium also executes user interface tests, while Cucumber executes acceptance tests.
Many business testers should prefer Cucumber over Selenium because Cucumber lets you create test scenarios with Gherkin, a plain-English scripting language. Using Gherkin rather than code ensures test script creation is a more streamlined process. As a result, anyone can write, read, and understand test scripts, even with zero experience with automated testing.
Cumber was originally written in Ruby. However, Cucumber now supports different programming languages, including JavaScript and Java.
3. Selenium + AI
If you are looking for a Selenium alternative, you may want to consider a Selenium and AI strategy, particularly when it comes to scriptless automation. While they are not necessarily an alternative to Selenium, scriptless tools are an excellent way to work on a Selenium framework while fixing some issues that stop testers from adopting Selenium natively.
For instance, Selenium doesn’t have self-healing functions as a standalone option. As such, testers who automate tests with Selenium scripts often struggle with flaky tests and dips in quality whenever the app updates with new features.
Manyitioned to self-healing Selenium scripts that merge Selenium technology with AI to overcome test flakiness. By utilizing AI, testers can make their testing process more reliable, as they can build scenarios to local app elements accurately and solve any UI issues automatically.
Also, testers who merge scriptless automation tools with AI solve many issues with Selenium test creation. For example, Perfecto Scriptless lets testers create tests in Selenium without any code, making Selenium more accessible to testers of all skill levels.
4. Robot Framework
Robot Framework is an open-source (free) Selenium alternative often used for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Testers and developers use keyword-based methodology in the Robot Framework as an automation tool for web and mobile applications.
One of the biggest benefits of the Robot Framework is that it is agnostic to the application. Robot Framework can assess various applications under test using libraries as their interface. Robot Framework is also easy to learn, even if you are new to keyword-driven testing.
5. Protractor
Like Robot Framework, Protractor is another open-source alternative. However, Protractor was intended for Angular web app testing. By interacting with the application as if it were a user, Protractor can run end-to-end test scripts; these scripts are based on JavaScript.
As well as being easier to use from a programming language standpoint, Protractor is considered superior (and more user-friendly) than Selenium for Angular applications. In addition, Protractor is based on JavaScript Selenium WebDriver, so testers familiar with Selenium WebDriver can enjoy all those benefits as well.
Protractor can also operate alongside your Selenium servers, so testers can use Protractor to assist their Selenium testing strategy if they mostly work with the Selenium framework.
Bottom Line
As you can see, there are numerous Selenium alternatives available for testing teams. Each alternative has advantages and disadvantages; some can be used alongside Selenium for greater test coverage.
Ensure you choose the right tool or framework for your organization; consider your objectives, scope to test, skillset, and other factors before making your decision.