07
Feb 2023
Appium V/s Selenium: Everything you need to Know
Companies must exploit all available tools to enhance production, boost efficiency, and cut costs as technologies continue to change quickly. Because of this, more businesses are starting to use an agile approach to software development. As a result, research teams are now required to automate test cycles.
This Blog’s intention is to bring attention to the distinctions between Appium and selenium.
What is Selenium :
One of the most popular open-source Web UI (User Interface) automation testing suites is Selenium. Jason Huggins invented it first in 2004 as a tool at Thought Works’ internal use. Selenium offers automation across numerous platforms, programming languages, and browsers.
Selenium has a tool suite, consisting of four main components:
Selenium IDE
Selenium WebDriver
Selenium Grid
Through the use of automation, QAs may check the cross-browser compatibility of their web apps on both desktops and mobile devices using the Selenium tool suite. On operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh. Selenium can be quickly and easily installed. Additionally, it supports mobile operating systems including iOS, Windows Mobile, and Android. Selenium supports different programming languages through the use of drivers specific to each language. Selenium Web driver is currently most commonly used with Java and C#. Any of the supported programming languages can be used to create a Selenium test script, that can be executed directly in the majority of modern web browsers. Selenium supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari as supported browsers. In order to achieve continuous testing, Selenium can be connected with other automation test tools like Maven, Jenkins, & Docker. To manage test cases and produce reports, it can also be connected with tools like TestNG and JUnit.
Benefits of Selenium
While Selenium has numerous benefits, the following are a few of the most important ones that highlight why most users pick Selenium over testing tools.
1. It guarantees software development life cycle (SDLC) process agility and transparency among cross-functional teams.
2. It requires less hardware involvement.
3. It is open-source and cross-platform.
4. It has a user-friendly interface that makes it simple to build and execute test scripts.
5. Excellent visibility is provided for testing end-to-end apps.
6. The automated test suites can be used again and tested on other operating systems and browsers.
7. Features such as test case regrouping and refactoring boost its flexibility.
Disadvantages of Selenium:
In addition to the previously mentioned benefits, the Selenium testing tool has certain drawbacks, including
1. Selenium only supports testing web apps. It is unable to evaluate desktop programs and other software.
2. Selenium is unable to access web elements that are available outside of the web applications that are being tested.
3. No guaranteed user support is available. We have to depend on customer communities.
4. Selenium doesn’t support image testing by itself. For image testing, it must be combined with Sikuli.
What is Appium:
The app is tested using Appium, an open-source mobile automation testing tool. To automate native and hybrid mobile apps, Sauce Labs has developed and is providing support for them. As a cross-platform mobile automation tool, it enables the execution of the same test across many platforms. By using Appium, multiple devices may be tested simultaneously with ease.
The market for mobile applications is very relevant right now. People are currently turning their websites into mobile applications. Therefore, it is crucial to be knowledgeable about mobile software automation testing technology and to keep up with current technological developments. Currently popular in mobile automation testing technology is the Appium mobile application testing tool. For automated testing of native, hybrid, and web applications, utilize Appium. It provides automated testing on both actual devices and emulators (Android, iOS) (Android and iOS both). This tool used to be primarily focused on IOS and Android applications, which were mainly tested for mobile applications. A few updates earlier, Appium revealed that Windows desktop application testing will now be supported. The testing tool for the Selenium Web driver is very similar to Appium. So, once you have a working knowledge of Selenium Web driver, learning Appium is easy. Appium provides a framework that transforms Selenium Web driver commands into UI Automator and UIAutomation commands for Android and iOS, respectively, depending on the device type rather than the OS type, therefore it is not dependent on the operating system of mobile devices.
It supports several languages that have Selenium client libraries, including Java, PHP, Objective C, C#, Python, JavaScript with node.js, Ruby, and many others. The Selenium backend of Appium gives testing needs control over the capabilities of Selenium.
Benefits of Appium:
1. Appium is a free tool because it is open-source software. Installing it is simple.
2. Applications that are hybrid, native, or on the web can all be tested automatically.
3. You do not need to add any extra agents to your app to make Appium compatible with automation, unlike other testing solutions. The same app that will be uploaded to the App Store is verified.
4. A new feature was provided to Appium. Now, in addition to offering to test mobile applications, it would also offer testing of Windows desktop applications.
5. Cross-platform mobile testing is made possible by the free, open-source program known as Appium. This indicates that you can test across several platforms (single API for both Android and IOS platforms).
Disadvantages of Appium
Along with having various benefits, Appium also has several downsides, including the following:
1. Absence of detailed reports.
2. It is a little slow because the tests depend on the remote web driver.
3. The fact that Appium uses UI Automator for Android, which only supports Android SDK, API 16, or higher, is not a restriction but rather an overhead. But Appium does not directly support earlier APIs. To support older APIs, it makes use of Selendroid, another open-source library.
4. One test can only be run at a time per Mac since each Mac OS device can only run one instance (iOS Script) of iOS. a variety of Macs.
Techctice is the best automation training institute with a placement in Bhubaneswar providing Selenium training will help you learn the most basic and advanced concepts of Automation Testing using Selenium. During automation testing courses, you will be taught how to manage your automation environment using Selenium-supported plugins like TestNG Framework, Robot Class, and Cucumber. in these software testing automation courses which are conducted as offline and online classes in Bhubaneswar, you will learn automation testing which relates to the real-time environment execution
Techctice has a thorough professional course created to provide students with the technical know-how and understanding of Appium. Our goal is for our students to be industry specialists in the automated testing of native, hybrid, and web apps on mobile application user interfaces. Techctice is The top training center for Appium in Bhubaneswar with placements that train students to utilize Appium for automated testing of native, hybrid, and online applications on mobile application user interfaces.
