Selenium HQ Reviews

We are using Selenium HQ for the automation of web applications.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise.

The solution has improved the company by reducing a lot of manual work.

The most valuable feature of Selenium HQ is the ability to configure a lot of automated processes.

We can only use Selenium HQ for desktop applications which would be helpful. We are only able to do online based applications.

I have been using Selenium HQ for approximately three years.

Selenium HQ is a stable solution. However, it depends on how the applications are identified. If the applications or objects are identified correctly then it is stable. Otherwise, we can have some glitches in the identification and verification.

The scalability of Selenium HQ is good. It can be scaled. There are some robotic files that can be added to scale up the solution.

We have approximately 2,000 to 3,000 users using this solution in our company.

Depending on the project we are involved with, we could use the solution daily, weekly, or monthly.

We use forums and documentation that are helpful for troubleshooting.

If you only look at the web application automation from Selenium HQ compared to other tools, such as WorkSoft and UFT, the speed of execution is very slow in WorkSoft and UFT. The scalability with multiple browsers is simpler and easier in Selenium HQ, whereas it's a bit more complicated in WorkSoft and UFT.

Selenium HQ's initial setup was straightforward. However, the integration part took some time.

I rate the initial setup of Selenium HQ a four out of five.

Selenium HQ is a free solution.

This solution is good to use if the application that is getting identified for the objects is able to uniquely identify the properties. If this process works well then it is good to use. If it is a web application, they can use this solution, but if a desktop-based application is involved, then they should look for another solution.

I rate Selenium HQ an eight out of ten.

I have led regression testing projects involving CRM, employee registration, and eCommerce. In each of these test cases, we have used the automation tool which has brought us benefits in time savings, shortening schedules, or recovering lost time - all of this leading to money savings. 

It's very useful when there are constant changes in the back-end. If the changes are constant in the source end it is not a good idea to use it. It is very important to previously evaluate the use of the tool depending on the characteristics.

The main improvement is the lower cost of regression tests. It will probably be more expensive in the first iteration (more or less 30%), however, we can save up to 40% or 50% in the next runs. 

Another benefit is that, once the test scripts have been built, it is not necessary for the person executing the test processes to be an expert, allowing resources and costs to be optimized with lower costs in human talent. 

In addition, the barrier of functional knowledge is eliminated; specialization is not necessary during the life cycle of the tests.

The main characteristic that is useful is that the tool is completely free.

Additionally, currently, you can find resources that handle the characteristics of the tool very well. 

The range of web platforms it supports is also wide, including the operating system platforms. It is possible to reuse the test scenarios that have been built in iterations after the first one or in the improvements of the systems that are part of the normal maintenance and updating that must be done periodically and that imply an investment in tests.

A great improvement could be in the user experience which is necessary as it does not have much. The use is too technical; it is not designed for the end-user. The best way to maintain the test scenarios over time should be considered. If the test scenarios are not subdivided correctly, it is very likely that maintenance will become very expensive and re-use is unlikely. This would ultimately mean that it would reflect the possible benefits in the projects and, on the contrary, the use of the solution ends up being more expensive.

I have been working with Selenium for five years.

The latest version should always be treated with care. Being open-source it can be unstable.

The scalability will depend on where the tool is installed.

Until now, I have not used the support service. Everything has been done using the documentation that is registered in the forums.

Neutral

In the past, I used a very good solution. However, it had a high cost and had to be used by more than one resource.

The initial setup can be very complex.

In my case, the initial setup was done internally.

The ROI can be between 20% to 50% in the testing process in the medium and long term. In the short term, it can be 10% or less.

As for the license, there is not much to say. It is free, however, the configuration must be done correctly or it can be very expensive.

Other options that I evaluated were TestComplete, Kathalon, and IBM.

It must be evaluated very well before being used. In my case, we implemented a front-end that facilitates the use. If you want to use it in the future I can give you some access.

We use Selenium HQ for web-based test automation.

Selenium HQ allows us to customize our automation scripts, which has been beneficial as we can develop our own logic. This flexibility, combined with the introduction of large language models (LLMs), has made our test automation faster and quicker. Additionally, Selenium HQ being a free tool saves a lot of money and time for our organization.

The core features of Selenium HQ are the most valuable. This includes driving the web, reporting, and parallel execution. The ability to customize our approach to using Selenium HQ is particularly beneficial.

There is a need for an auto-healing feature that can address script failures due to changes in the front end. This feature is claimed to be in development, and if it works as intended, it would help address a significant challenge we face.

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

Selenium HQ provides a high level of stability, which increases our test coverage.

The high level of scalability has allowed us to improve our test coverage.

I have not communicated directly with Selenium HQ's technical support. I use the available documentation online and third-party tools like Stack Overflow and Yellow Lab.

Positive

Setting up Selenium HQ is straightforward. Before I joined, it was already deployed in our organization. Deploying new applications takes less than a day.

The primary advantage is that things get automated, saving a lot of money and time. Exact figures are not available, but the time savings are significant.

I rate the pricing of Selenium HQ as very affordable. We hardly incur any cost.

It might be a little tough in the beginning, but users will get used to it over time.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I use Selenium HQ to migrate manual test cases in automation scripts. 

For example, with respect to a quality analyst, if I want to test a certain scenario, I have to write the test cases. It may be a small test case, a regulation test case, or a synergy test case. Selenium will migrate them in the automation script. Instead of executing all my test cases manually, I can run an automation suit that has been written with the help of Selenium. Selenium will execute this automation suit, and it will provide an execution report. The report will be 100% accurate using the code we wrote.

Selenium is an open-source tool that has significantly reduced the cost for the company.

The plugins, the components, and the method of the library with Selenium is very user defined. Anyone with a good depth of technical skills can use their library with the help of their package.

One limitation of Selenium is that it is purely focused on web application testing. For example, if there is a webpage where we need to upload some documents or emails in the webpage and I want to automate that scenario with the help of Selenium, it will not be possible. I can not upload any documents because when I am clicking on the browser the Windows pop up will appear. 

It would be beneficial if Selenium HQ would develop integrated plugins, and inbuilt features, which would help us to automate Windows based applications. With the help of other third party plugins, like AutoIt, Robot Class, or Sikuli we can integrate Windows based applications. 

Another limitation of Selenium HQ is that we can not automate the capture part. EML processing is not available in Selenium, particularly if a website requires some capture kind of validations before logging into the application. To overcome this situation, we can disable the capture part from the application side, so we can get access to the database directly.

I have been using Selenium HQ for six years.

The solution is stable.

Selenium HQ scales well.

I would rate customer service and support average overall.

Neutral

The initial setup of Selenium is easy, usually taking two to three hours to complete.

The installation is completed in-house. 

The solution is open-source, so it is 100% free with no hidden charges.

We chose to use Selenium HQ based on our customer needs and costs.

I would recommend that anyone who is looking to implement Selenium into their organization should have strong technical knowledge. At least one person should have some programming language skill set in either Java, Python or C#. 

Selenium libraries are a tool that could be reused, but how to frame, integrate and optimize by reducing a line of code to get the proper maximum efficient output requires technical knowledge. It is valuable to have experience prior to joining the Selenium HQ community.

Overall, I would rate Selenium HQ an eight out of 10.

We don't directly use Selenium. We have built a wrapper around Selenium so other teams can consume it.

We are using version 4.0.1. We run it on a Microsoft public cloud in the CI/CD server.

There are around four teams which are currently using this solution, and we have a target of having around 10 teams.

It's easy for new people to get trained on this solution. If we are hiring new people, the resource pool in the market in test automation is largely around Selenium. It has a wider community. If there are issues, you can look around online and find a good solution.

Selenium is in continuous development. They release very stable versions. Those are the key points which helped us pick Selenium over other tools.

There are a few things we have to actually design and plan when we are building the automation. There are new tools which handle it by themselves, but that is a give and take when you actually use or choose a tool. 

Shadow DOM could be improved and the handling of single page applications. Right now, it's a bit complicated and there are a lot of additional scripts required if you want to handle a single page application in a neat way.

With these technologies, at times you have a lot of callbacks. Those aren't handled very well with Selenium. At some point of time, suppose you have entered something and the button needs to be enabled. Now, in normal terms, it seems to be a client side action, so if you enter something on the client side, JavaScript is running. It'll say, "Value is this, so I'll enable the button."

With this technology, if you enter something, it will go back to the server, get some value, and then it will enable the button. At some point of time, your project's delayed, and there is a callback happening in the background. It will not try to understand that, and it may just timeout.

I have been using this solution for about eight years.

I think it has stabilized a lot, but it's not the best tool in the market. It has a lot of room for improvement, but it has a very big community.

It is certainly scalable. It depends on how you want to use it. You can use it over a grid with multiple office machines, or you can run it standalone.

We have never used technical support because there is normally good content on the internet.

We evaluated other options but chose Selenium because of the skill sets in the market. If you use other solutions, the challenge is that if a person leaves, you won't get a second person or third person. Replacements are very difficult to come by if you are using different solutions.

It's actually complex. It's not really straightforward, but it depends on what you're actually building for your organization. We have built a wrapper around it for other teams that are actually consuming it.

Initially, you build a solution around it, which is a challenge. If you are trying to build a standalone automation with Selenium, it will be a challenge.

There isn't a set deployment. If a team wants to use it, they can start using it from day one.

It's open-source, so it's free.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

Learning is easy. Implementation is not as easy, but it is still better than other tools in the market right now. I'm giving it an eight because there are a lot of things Selenium is not supporting. The rest of technology is changing, but they are not changing along with it. Normally, if we are writing a complex test, we have to do a lot of workarounds, which isn't good when we are writing scripts.

I think it's very easy to screw up with Selenium if you're using it for the first time. If you are getting it for a large organization or large project, it makes sense to have some professional help.

We do UI-based functional testing in Selenium. We have prioritized some of the use cases that are most likely to be affected, and we have added those to our regression suite. Each week or each month, we trigger the regression suite to check that nothing is broken.

It supports many external plugins, and because it's a Java-based platform, it's language-independent. You can use Java, C#, Python, etc. It's open to different platforms, but you have to be really good at coding to work with this.

If they can integrate more recording features, like UFT, it would be helpful for automation, but it's not necessary. They can also add a few more reporting features for advanced reporting.

I have been using this solution for the last four years. 

It's a stable product.

It's scalable. If you have a Jenkins setup and you are running on the grid, it's robust and smooth.

We have about 300 users, and it's used on a daily basis.

We have mostly used online support. Whatever you're looking for, the answers are already available on the web. If any technical issues are there, our own internal IT team is also able to fix them. I don't remember any instance of connecting with their support. So, it has been really smooth.

Positive

Its initial setup is a little tough. It could take around six hours, but if you are experienced enough, you can do it within an hour. If you are a complete beginner, it will be a little difficult.

You have to be really good with the POM dependencies, and you have to be used to working on different IDEs, such as IntelliJ or Eclipse ID. Based on the different setups, you have to consider the POM file and also integrate those dependencies. These things take up some time initially, but once they are done, it works well. I would rate it a 4 out of 5 in terms of the setup.

It doesn't require much maintenance. If you are upgrading to a new version, the basic changes will be needed, but not that much maintenance is needed. It's really easy. They do a release every six or seven months.

Selenium is an open-source product. It is free.

It's one of the best tools I have worked on. It's a strong tool and a winner in functional testing and automation testing. It's open source, and it also supports mobile testing. Other tools, such as UFT, are quite expensive. 

I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

Selenium's major use cases are UI and web automation, primarily for the front end of a website. We also use it for API automation using other libraries called RestAssured. The programming language can be Java, C Sharp, or anything, but we are mostly using Java. For mobile automation, we use Selenium with APM.

Productivity-wise, Selenium helps us in regression testing, which we need to repeat every sprint and during every release cycle. Though development may take some time, we are now utilizing AI tools like ChatGPT, which makes it faster to develop the code. Cost-wise, it provides savings because it's open source, so we do not have to bear any cost of the tool itself.

Selenium is an open-source tool. It provides the flexibility to automate anything and everything. You can build custom libraries and integrate them with third-party libraries across the globe. It gives freedom to integrate with any other tool and build your custom solutions. It also integrates well with test management and project management tools like Jira, Manta, and Azure DevOps.

In the future, Selenium should be able to automate desktop-based applications, as it is not currently able to handle non-web-based, Windows-based applications. Additionally, there is a need for Selenium to be more user-friendly, allowing users from all backgrounds to automate test cases without requiring too much coding knowledge.

Selenium has been in use for more than 14 years.

For stability, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

I believe Selenium is scalable, and I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

There is a community in which you can post your questions, and you do get answers there.

Positive

Recently, I worked with Katalon. Then, I worked with WebDriverIO with Node.js.

The setup experience is much easier these days. You no longer need to manually download dependent files like JAR files. You can easily go to the Maven repository and get all of the dependencies. Setup has become more straightforward, and I would rate it around seven out of ten.

Being an open-source tool, Selenium's cost is completely free, and there are no licensing fees.

In addition to Selenium, we are using Playwright and Myspro for mobile automation in different projects.

For users starting with automation, I recommend learning Selenium with any language they're comfortable with, such as Java, C Sharp, Python, JavaScript, or Ruby on Rails. It sets up a foundation for any tester wanting to explore automation testing.

I'd rate the solution 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.