Selenium vs Testcomplete: A Quick Comparison

Test automation is one of the most cost-effective and time-saving methods to test software products with long maintenance cycles. TestComplete and Selenium are the two most important automation testing tools which provide an open platform for you to easily build continuous testing frameworks to test non-stop with a lightweight execution engine and distributed testing.

Let’s dive deeper and understand these popular automated testing toolsets with their differences.

1. TestComplete

TestComplete is an Automated UI Testing Tool developed by SmartBear Software. TestComplete has the ability to create automated functional tests for desktop, web, and mobile applications. It also has native support for Behavioral Driven Development (BDD).

This tool is said to be very easy to use with Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is fast and easy to create, maintain, and execute functional tests which will increase test coverage and ensure you ship high-quality, battle-tested software.

It has unmatched hybrid object recognition engine with artificial intelligence. Its object recognition combines property-based and AI-powered visual recognition to find dynamic UI elements quickly, easily, and accurately.

It is also called a Script or Scriptless tool. The reason behind this is that if you want to script, you can presently do so in seven different languages (JavaScript, Python, VBScript, Jscript, DelphiScript, C#, and C+). If you do not want to script, then you can use its record and play feature.   

It is a paid tool by SmartBear. You can bundle options or customize your order. You can view its price here.

Brief History:-

TestComplete was developed in 1999 by AutomatedQA which is currently based in Somerville, Massachusetts. The current stable version of TestComplete is 14.0 which was launched in January 2019. SmartBear Software is one of the subsidiary companies of AutomatedQA corp.

Career Aspects:-

It is a highly paid tool which makes it difficult for many organisations to use it. They provide a 30 days free trial. Some good product-based companies use this tool. There are fewer job openings on this tool currently. It is always difficult to learn a paid tool on your own. Although it is a very powerful tool, it is not widely used. TestComplete resources are paid more. It will have less career growth as this tool has everything inbuilt in it and can drastically reduce the number of resources needed to write automated tests.

If you are planning to start your career in TestComplete then taking up Automation Testing using Testcomplete Training will be an added advantage.

Cons of TestComplete:-

• License cost is high.
• Only supports Windows.
• No much help available through open communities.
• Not easy to start with official documentation
• The tool has stability issues
• Cheaper than QTP but not as powerful and stable as QTP

2. Selenium:

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web browsers which means it can be used to automate an only web-based application. The more precisely only front end of a web application across different browsers and platforms. It can be used with many programming languages and testing frameworks.

Different tools in Selenium:-

Selenium consists of four tools:-

• Selenium IDE
• Selenium RC
• Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium Grid.

Currently, Selenium 4 is about to launch and the alpha version is already launched as of this article is being written.

History of Selenium:-

Selenium was developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago. Later it was made open source and it has become a more powerful and popular tool for web application automation.

Career Aspects:-

Selenium is an open source tool which increases its popularity in organizations which are mainly service based. Its flexibility of integration with major programming language makes it more adaptable.

Selenium has more future growth and a higher number of job openings. You can easily learn and practice as so many free online tutorials and help communities are available. Also, you can take up Selenium training to advance your career.

Let’s Compare TestComplete and Selenium :-

As we have seen a basic introduction about TestComplete and Selenium, you must be confused about which of these tools is the best and how you can select a tool which properly suits your requirements. Don’t worry, we will compare both tools here so that it could solve your problem.

Conclusion:- 

TestComplete is a script-less tool which does not require mandatory programming skills to start with. It is very easy to use and helps in creating robust scripts. It is much more powerful and feature-rich compared to Selenium. But the cost of TestComplete is higher and companies go for open-source tools like Selenium. Selenium has more career growth and learning opportunities as you need to be good at programming. TestComplete has fewer job openings as like Selenium, you do not need more resources in a project.

So TestComplete is best suited for an average-skilled team and restrict timeline projects for faster creation of test scripts. Project budget can be adjusted by reducing the number of resources needed.