Part 2: Difference between Selenium IDE and WebDriver

Choices, choices, choices...

With such a large variety of choices available to us in the QA world, this article will help to make the decision on choosing which solution is appropriate for your test environment.

Let's take a look at the basic differences between Selenium IDE and Selenium WebDriver.

Selenium IDE

- Great for beginners and testing novices
- Easy to use record and playback capabilities
- Can quickly create low to medium complexity automated tests
- Can only be used on FireFox as it is an addon

Selenium WebDriver

- Great for intermediate to advanced levels
- Requires a greater level of configuration to set up a test environment
- Can be used to create highly complex automated tests
- Can be used to automate a large variety of web browsers

Part 1: What is Selenium?

The QA industry is very diverse, and with that diversity brings a multitude of different testing tools.

Selenium is one of those opensource tools that allows you to develop automated tests for Web sites while enabling integration in to the test management tool of your choice, with a few tweaks.

In short, Selenium is a tool that automates web browsers in order to be able to test web sites and web applications.

Image: Courtesy of SeleniumHQ

It comes in two flavours to suit a variety of needs for different projects:

- Selenium IDE

- Selenium WebDriver

There are many different tools out there in the QA market, but few have the community support and technical reach of Selenium. Some argue that there are more established vendors out there with more "popular" tools available. This may be true, but when it comes to ROI in setting up an automated test environment with Selenium at the core, it is indeed very attractive.

This series of tutorials aims to help build a set of core skills to enable people to use Selenium effectively.

Part 2 - Differences between Selenium IDE and WebDriver