Top 5 Alternatives to Selenium

Test Automation….it has become the holy grail in the success or failure of software companies throughout the world. Companies that have test automation and continuous integration/delivery built into their deployment pipelines have been able to stay ahead of their competitors by launching their products and services in a relatively quick timeframe. One of the important aspects of successful test automation is the right selection of tools.

A wrong tool selected for a given task

• May steeply increase the learning curve so that training yourself and the team becomes a nightmare.

• May increase the time to develop test scripts.

• May prevent you from migrating legacy test scripts.

Therefore, selecting the right set of tools is an important decision that software and DevOps teams have to make in their journey to move towards 100% test automation. Over the past few years, there are only two tools that engineers have more or less adopted as the standard: QTP and Selenium. But there is this feeling that some of these tools have not evolved enough to match the current rate of development and deployment standards. There is a need for a smarter and better-automated testing approach that is suitable for rapid and agile practices. Here I present the top 5 alternatives to Selenium. One of them might just be the tool you are looking for to take test automation up another notch.

5. Hiptest

Hiptest is a BDD-like testing platform which is cloud-based and allows various stakeholders to co-design acceptance tests. It provides a real-time environment for designing, executing, and refactoring tests. Test specifications can be created in Gherkin syntax and allows you to design domain-specific keywords (called Actionwords). Tests can be exported to various languages/frameworks including Java, Ruby, Python, Robot Framework, and Cucumber. The cool thing about Hiptest is that it has a JIRA integration plugin through which the pass/fail status of your tests can be directly viewed from JIRA.

Website - Checkout Hiptest at https://hiptest.net

License – Freemium (Free for 3 users)

4. Fitnesse

Fitnesse is a wiki-based acceptance test framework. It is an all-in-one framework, web server, wiki, and automated test tool. Since it is web-based, anyone can define the tests, run the tests, and view the results. The project stakeholders do not have to perform any tool installation on their end to define and view the test specifications. This stands out as the biggest advantage of using Fitnesse when compared to other tools in the market. Tests can be defined in various languages like Ruby, Python, and PHP by installing the necessary plugins. You can also define BDD-based test specs using “GivWhenZen” or “Jbehave” plugins.

Website – Visit http://fitnesse.org

License – Free

3. Ghost Inspector

Ghost Inspector is a cloud-based automated website testing and monitoring service tool. You can think of this tool as an advanced record and playback tool (Selenium IDE, anyone?). Ghost Inspector provides Google Chrome and Firefox plugins to record browser actions and allows users to save the tests on their cloud platform. The best part about Ghost Inspector is the ability to configure the notifications, scheduling the tests and other test-related configuration. It is very well designed and thought out. Hence, this tool made it to the Top 3 (@HomeUnion we use this tool for sanity testing our applications). The other good thing about the tool is that the tests are very stable and it doesn’t suffer from the unreliability and flakiness of the Selenium Webdriver. In fact, you can configure the element wait times and other timeouts right from the settings. Neat! huh?

Website - https://ghostinspector.com

License – Freemium (100 free tests per month)

2. Testsigma

This is one of my favorites. I have started working on this tool a month or two back and it has clearly impressed me a lot. This tool has all the bells and whistles that any test automation engineer can think of, starting from intuitive test design framework, fast test development using natural language processing, ability to perform web application, mobile, and RESTful services testing in one single tool. The tool has integration with Saucelabs and Browserstack to run the tests, or you can configure the tests to run on the local network (they call it a hybrid test framework). I have been using this tool pretty regularly and it feels refreshing to see the thought and efforts they have put into building this tool. It is a new kid on the block and still has some way to go, to iron out a few minor issues in the tool, but all in all, this is a very promising tool that you need to check out.

Website - https://testsigma.com

License – Freemium (Free for 2 users/100 minutes). You can run unlimited local testing though (nice!).

1. Katalon Studio

The top honors go to Katalon Studio, which is arguably the best of the lot. It combines the powerful programming of Selenium framework to go along with a well-designed GUI, and the result is a powerful test automation platform. Built on top of the Selenium and Appium frameworks, Katalon Studio can be used for web application, mobile, and REST services testing.

Katalon Studio can be integrated into CI/CD processes and has integrations with JIRA, Jenkins, and Git. The tool has excellent reporting capabilities, where the user can send custom email notifications with excel, HTML, and PDF test reports. It also, has an analytics platform built in called Katalon Analytics which provides users comprehensive views of test execution reports via dashboard including metrics and graphs.

Website - https://www.katalon.com/

License – Free