Is Selenium the best software testing tool?

[Daragh]

I have been talking to a few testers recently who work in different companies. The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they love Selenium and they feel it is best software testing tool on the market. Is there anyone that would disagree?

[Alin]

Hi Daragh,

Selenium is very used especially because many testing activities are related to UI testing on web and mobile applications. Automation is continuously growing and a tester with programming skills finds Selenium perfect for developing automated tests; testers can choose almost all programming languages they want and they can use advanced IDEs for writing code. It is also preferred because it is free and there are companies that cannot afford purchasing expensive tools.

An interesting side is that paid tools are now supporting also Selenium; this is a clear evidence that it is very important for testing.
So, for UI testing we can say that Selenium is most probably the best tool.

But the topic regarding tools is a bit larger because we have to take into consideration other testing activities like testing desktop applications (where Selenium is not an option) or API testing (where tools like SoapUI or JMeter are very good and largely used).

Regards,
Alin

[Andrei Domuta]

I use ruby + watir for the web UI tests and I am completely satisfied with it. However, like Alin mentioned Selenium is suitable for more complex scenarios (various languages, mobile, et cetera)

[Kasper]

No, there is not one best tool. Try to do SOAP with Selenium, or anything without a gui for that matter.
It is good at what it does, just like JUnit, Cucumber, SoapUI and literally hundreds of other tools are.

[barret]

In my opinion there is no best tool for anything. It depends on the requirements of the system under test. Selenium might be a good choice for certain tasks, especially if you do not want to pay anything for a tool, but there might be better alternatives as well. For example, I have often seen comparisons between Ranorex (http://www.ranorex.com/test-automation-tools.html) and Selenium and most of the time Ranorex does it better.

[Author]

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