Selenium HQ Reviews

We are using mobile application and functional testing. It performs pretty well. 

We are using Selenium for scripting. We use Sauce Labs for the hardware device coverage on the client side.

The primary benefit is its cost and the ability to use the cloud. 

We use it with Sauce Labs. So, we have a large base of real devices and emulators, as well as breadth of coverage.

• Flexibility
• Scalability

It does require a programming skill set. I would like the product not to require a heavy programming skill set and be more user-friendly for someone without a programming background.

So far, I have not have any issues with its stability.

Technical support is one of the downsides of it. When you are buying a commercial tool from a vendor, your technical support is readily available but you are paying for it. However, they're going to take care of you. When you're dealing with open source, your support is based on research that you can do on the Internet. You rely on somebody else having had the same experience or one of the developers of the code having put something out there on the subject.

This product is open source and free. That was a huge deciding factor for us getting into it.

I don’t see it as a company spending money on anything. I like to keep up with the market because I built my career around test automation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Ease of implementation
• Ease of adaptability
• How much skill set would be required to operate it. Can I take somebody with no programming background and get them up and running on it, or does it require a heavy-duty programming background?

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.

FitNesse: The ability to present your tests on a wiki page and hooking them up to the scripts/fixtures. This is an amazing feature as you could literally ask your product owner, business analysts/developers to go to wiki and see all tests that are written and running automatically. Using the Gherkin format this can be very user readable, and one can also run those tests from the wiki themselves. They can even write their own tests using the available functions. Can easily be connected to Jenkins as well.

Selenium: The part with Selenium I like the most is the ability to parse and select an element from DOM. The various selectors make the job easier! At the same time one has to be careful of the selectors one uses, as it can make performance inefficient. With Selenium, one has a lot of freedom to choose the rest of the tools needed to make a full-fledged automation framework. You can use Cucumber/testing/JUnit as your test engine. You can use something else for reporting, etc., etc. It's available in so many languages, so you can choose the one which is close to your application. It’s not like a separate tool with its own scripting framework lying and maintained on the side. If your application is in Java, you can also choose Java for Selenium. If its C#, you can choose C# for Selenium. So your developers can also contribute to your framework and code.

It has largely improved our efficiency in QA. So every regression we don’t have to run a lot of repeatable test cases for which the flow didn’t change. However they are important to execute, so automation helps us there. Daily Smoke runs and weekly regression runs ensure that Build is continuously tested, which helps in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. I must be cautious here: You cannot automate everything as you still need the exploratory and cognitive behavior of a human being. So a part of testing over releases will still be manual. Efficiency can be achieved on repeatable tasks, which is still quite a gain.

Selenium could offer better ways to record and create scripts. IDE is available, however, it can be improved.

About four years.

No issues with stability. The Selenium community maintains it well.

Depends on the hardware we choose to host the automation scripts. No issues there.

There is enough material on the internet and the community answers questions/problems pretty fast. So, very good!

In the past I have used HPE QuickTest Pro, now ALM. Also Coded UI. However, Selenium is better for web applications, although the others provide more versatility in terms of supporting more than just web applications! They come with their license fees as well.

As Selenium is just a library, you have to build the whole framework around it yourself. There are enough templates available on internet to give you a head start, though.

There is no pricing cost. License is Apache License 2.0.

Ours is a web application and, considering my experience with other tools, our choice was easier. We did try Protractor and Jasmine, however Protractor is also based on Selenium. It works better with angular pages. For us, Selenium was enough and we want to use FitNesse.

If you have a web application, I would strongly recommend this, as it has a lot of benefits as described above.

I mainly use Selenium HQ for web application automation.

Selenium HQ's most valuable feature is its online community support, which is comprehensive and easy to access. 

Selenium HQ doesn't have any self-healing capabilities. It would also be improved with the ability to input multiple identifiers and quickly search the content. In the future, Selenium HQ should include machine learning features.

I've been using Selenium HQ for seven to eight years.

I haven't found many issues related to stability - so far, Selenium HQ has worked wonders for me.

In terms of scalability, I'm not particularly happy with the grid stuff, but it is scalable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, so long as you have the correct plugin. I would rate the setup experience 4.5 out of 5.

Selenium HQ costs around $1000 per month, which is a bit high based on what they're offering.

I would recommend anyone thinking of implementing Selenium HQ to go for it - it fits into every format, depending on your time and skillset. I would rate Selenium HQ nine 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.

Selenuim helps us during testing. We are able to reduce the number and frequency of manual efforts by using scripts.

I would like for the next release to support parallel testing.

We were using Micro Focus UFT which is for Windows application and used Selenium for web use. The two solutions are not comparable in my opinion because they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The initial setup was straightforward. I was able to add the packages that I wanted and quickly get started with development in a day.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using Selenium HQ as a plugin within Visual studio and we develop in C#. We use the Visual Studio IDE and Selenium is our solution for automation testing.

The most valuable feature is that it is open-source.

The testing solution produces the best web applications.

Selenium uses a layer-based approach that is somewhat slower than Eggplant when it comes to executing code. The performance is something in need of improvement.

There is no direct option for image validation and this would be a useful addition in the future. In our application, we have a graphical representation that needs to be validated, and it can be done by validating all of the images. However, we can't do that with Selenium so we don't cover these scenarios in our test cases.

We have been using Selenium for more than six years.

We have not faced any issues in terms of stability.

We have not needed to contact technical support specifically for Selenium because there is a lot of information available on the internet. If we have problems then we can gather the solution ourselves.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We are satisfied with the pricing.

We have just completed a PoC with Eggplant and we prefer it because they have support for testing desktop applications.

In summary, this is a good product. If it is a web application that you are testing then this is the best option.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our company is a customer of Selenium and I work in QA.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is Web Scraping although overall I think every single feature of Selenium is valuable because it's purely API so we can integrate it with any other tool.

In terms of improvement, I think there could be additional readability and abstraction in the solution, similar to the way other frameworks function. The solution could possibly use a more generic framework with more machine learning. If the community or IT companies had the budget, they might be able to work on that but it would definitely improve the solution, particularly in areas such as image comparison and image recognition. Machine learning capability would enable a self-healing capability in terms of locators. Selenium is not a magician, you need to provide instructions in order for it to identify any element in the web. That would really be an advantageous feature. Jason Arbon, CEO at test.ai, demonstrated this in Appium, which derives from Selenium. 

I'd also like to see a one-click install package. For now, I have to use TestNG, then Java, and then build them back. That could be simplified. 

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

It's a pretty stable solution but we have to be careful and make sure we're using what has been released. We need to know which version to use and make sure it's the latest one so we know it will be stable. 

We are a small setup so have four or five users in the company. I've worked in bigger companies where thousands have used the solution on a daily basis, so it's very scalable. 
It's not the solution that deals with scalability, it's the cloud or a virtual system that enables scaling. If there are 1,000 test cases that I want to commute in an hour, then sometimes the reports can be messy.

We use Selenium forums most of the time and we get most of our answers from there. There are multiple people online providing answers. Selenium does provide a service but we don't use it because we are self-sufficient in that respect.

I have used Coded UI from Microsoft, which I believe will be deprecated some time this year. That was a very good solution. Before that, I also used HP QTP. Both of those are easier solutions than Selenium but also quite expensive. 

The very first setup several years ago was quite complex, nowadays it is simple. Generally we use Maven, so it is simply importing and doing the setup. If I already know the settings, it can be deployed within half an hour. It depends on the system configuration so there can be issues sometimes. Setup can easily be done internally and if there are good community people there could be a one-stop solution layer where installation is one click. Maintenance is only required when there are updates or API changes. 

The solution requires good understanding of Python, Pearl or Java and it's important to use the documentation. It would take a few hours of watching video sessions or reading the documentation to get started. It also helps to have an understanding of how API works, the architecture and how Selenium interacts with browsers. Having the background helps to design something with more features. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.