Benefits or Advantages of Selenium Tool

Profile picture for user dgulati

Below are the reasons you should choose Selenium over other tools in the market:

  1. Open Source: Selenium is leading open source web test automation framework. So, being an open source tool, Selenium is a publicly accessible automation framework and is free, with no upfront costs. Selenium being open source also helps you customize the code for better code management and enhance the functionality of predefined functions and classes.
  2. Major Languages Support: Selenium supports script creation using different languages like Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl etc. You can write your scripts in any of these programming languages and Selenium converts it into Selenium compatible codes in no time. 
  3. Support Multiple OS: Selenium supports various operating systems (MS Windows, Linux, Mac etc.). You can create your Selenium script on any OS and same script will execute on all the operating systems. Different people use different operating systems and it is necessary that your automation tool supports all of them. 
  4. Multi Browsers Support: Selenium supports different browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari, Edge etc). Which are the widely used browsers in the world and are compatible with the Selenium. Single Selenium script can run on all the browsers. "One Selenium script for all browsers" is what Selenium community have been working on and improvising every day.
  5. Parallel Test Execution: Selenium supports parallel test case execution. With the help of Selenium Grid, we can execute multiple tests in parallel, hence reducing the test execution time. With the help of cloud-grids for cross-browser testing you can test across as many as hundreds of browsers in parallel using Selenium hence saving you time in multiples of hundreds.
  6. Easy to Learn: It is easy to learn. Selenium provides a user-friendly interface that helps create and execute test scripts easily and effectively. With the radically growing community, Selenium tutorials, testing, and development support is just a Google search away. 
  7. Reusability: Same script can be executed on multiple browsers and OS combination.
  8. Integration with other tools: You can integrate Selenium with TestNG and JUnit for managing test cases and generating reports. For achieving continuous testing, you’ll need to integrate it with some CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Maven, and Docker. Also, for performing image-based testing, you need to integrate Selenium with tools like Sikuli, and for performing cross-browser testing with cloud-grid such as LambdaTest. For reporting you can also integrate Selenium with Extent and Allure libraries.
  9. Flexibility & Scalability: Regrouping and refactoring of test cases is very easy with Selenium. This helps developers and testers in quick changes to the code, reducing duplication, minimizing complications and improving maintainability. These features make Selenium more flexible and usable as compared to other automation testing tools and hence helps Selenium to keep an edge.
  10. Less Hardware Resources: If you compare Selenium with other vendor focused automation tools like QTP, UFT, SilkTest, you will find that Selenium requires less hardware as compared to other testing tools.
  11. Regular Updates & Community Support: Selenium community is also constantly releasing constant updates and upgrades. Selenium’s community is vibrant, growing and is seen as one of the real strength’s of the tool.
  12. Record and Play: Using Selenium IDE, Selenium provides record and play capability. You can record your scripts and play them back. Selenium IDE comes an extension for Firefox and Chrome browsers.