Appius vs. Selenium – DZone

Now can you imagine a world without mobile apps or web apps? Obviously, no! Apart from being the main communication or information hubs, they have become the fundamental platforms for carrying out everyday activities with just a few clicks, whether you reserve a table at a restaurant or pay bills.

With a highly competitive market, companies strive to deliver efficient applications without compromising on speed and quality. To ensure the quality of the application, they often prefer to use the best testing solution.

When it comes to test automation platforms, Selenium and Appium are two prominent players. Selenium is primarily used for cross-browser testing of web applications. On the other hand, Appium is used to test all types of mobile applications – hybrid, native and web applications – on different operating systems.

This article aims to provide an in-depth comparison between selenium and apia.

What is selenium?

Selenium is an open source test automation platform that consists of various tools and libraries to enable browser automation. Simply put, it’s a set of tools for automating cross-browser web application testing.

With this tool, you can perform cross-browser testing and ensure that your web application works correctly and consistently across browsers. You can write and run test scripts in multiple programming languages, including Java, Ruby, NodeJS, JavaScript, C#, PHP, and Python.

Moreover, Selenium is extensible, i.e. you can seamlessly integrate it with other testing frameworks, such as TestNG, JUnit, Cucumber, etc.

Selenium offers a robust ecosystem of browser automation tools that includes:

Selenium IDE

It is a test script recording and playback utility, which allows testers to export those recorded scripts to many languages. It is available as an extension for Chrome and Firefox and as a desktop application. The scope of Selenium IDE is limited, so the test scripts produced are not very robust or mobile.

Selenium Web Driver

It is the successor to Selenium RC and is the most important component of the toolset. It provides a programming interface for creating and executing test cases. Web elements of web pages are identified by writing text scripts, and then the desired actions are performed on these elements. It works faster than Selenium RC by making direct calls to web browsers.

Selenium network

It is a key segment of the Selenium suite as it allows us to run tests on different machines with correspondingly different browsers. Tests can be run simultaneously on different machines using different browsers and OS.

This set of tools allows QAs to automatically check the compatibility of their web applications with multiple browsers on desktop and mobile devices. Let’s understand this with an example.

Usage scenarios

Let’s take an example to understand the use of selenium. Please note that QA must check your e-commerce website’s functional testing scenario, which includes the following process:

• Click the search bar
• Search for a specific product
• Add the product to the cart
• Click on Continue to checkout

The above user scenario has been tested manually on multiple browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari. This is time consuming and also inefficient. Therefore, Selenium Grid, a tool from the Selenium tool suite, is used. It simultaneously runs tests on multiple browsers on multiple machines and operating systems. This facilitates an automated testing process, eliminating manual efforts.

What is Appium?

Appium is built on the idea that there should be no requirement for an SDK or app recompilation while testing native apps. It’s an open source project that makes design decisions and tools to foster a vibrant contributing community. Appium’s goal is to automate any mobile app from any language and any test framework, with full access to back-end APIs and DBs from the test code. You can write your tests with the development tools of your choice, using programming languages ​​(Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.). The Appium server is scripted in Node.js and is compatible with leading client libraries such as Java, Python, Ruby, PHP and several others. Appium is the most popular open source framework for mobile application automation testing.

Use case scenario

Consider that you have developed a basic mobile application and performed manual tests on Android and iOS devices. Everything is going as expected.

Now you’re introducing a new feature to your app, which requires testing to make sure it works correctly and doesn’t break existing features. As a result, manually testing the app on Android and iOS devices after developing each new feature is inefficient and burdensome.

Appium eliminates manual efforts and automates the tests of your app on Android and iOS devices.

Appium vs. Selenium: Key Benefits

Selenium

• Selenium is open-source and very easy to use
• It provides compatibility with multiple operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac
• It gives developers or QAs the flexibility to write scripts in the programming language of their choice (Java, Ruby, Python, etc.)
• It supports leading browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge.
• Enables parallel testing
• It offers solid documentation support

Appius

• Appium is free and open source
• Enables automated testing of native, hybrid and mobile web applications,
• Provides support for multiple programming languages ​​(Ruby, Java, Python, etc.)
• It enables cross-platform testing (Android and iOS) on real devices, emulators and simulators
• It enables cross-platform testing (Android and iOS) on real devices, emulators and simulators

Apius vs Selenium: A detailed comparison

Now let’s dive deeper into the differences between Appium and Selenium based on various parameters.

1. Design concept

The design concept behind Selenium was to automate the testing of web pages and web applications in different browsers and their versions. It is designed to speed up web application/website testing by automatically tracking browser behavior.

In contrast, Appium is developed on top of an HTTP server using Node.js. So if you want to use Appium, you need to install and configure Node.js on your system. Appium makes it easy to test mobile apps on platforms like Android, iOS and Windows.

2. WebDriver

As we already mentioned, WebDriver is one of the components of Selenium. It is a collection of language-specific bindings for launching browsers. It allows you to create browser-based regression automated test suits and distribute the scripts to different environments.

While using Selenium, you have two options for writing automation test suites – Selenium WebDriver and Selenium IDE. On the other hand, Appium only supports WebDriver for test automation. It uses WebDriver’s JSON wire protocol to manage Android and iOS sessions.

3. Platform support

Appium and Selenium are cross-platform test automation tools. Selenium supports testing on a multitude of browsers and major operating systems. However, it does not support Android and iOS platforms.

On the other hand, Appium supports mobile application testing on Android, iOS and Windows platforms.

4. Support for programming language

Appium and Selenium support multiple programming languages ​​for writing test scripts. Java, Ruby, NodeJS, JavaScript, C#, PHP and Python are a few programming languages ​​in which you can write and run test scripts with Selenium. Although Appium primarily supports Java, it comes with links for other languages.

Appium vs. Selenium vs. TestGrid: a direct comparison

Conclusion

The choice between Appium and Selenium depends entirely on the needs of your project. If you want to automate mobile app testing, Appium is the right choice. On the other hand, Selenium is great for automating web application testing.

However, if you are looking for a unified end-to-end testing solution, TestGrid is an ideal choice. Its Real Device Cloud ensures that a combination of real Android and iOS devices and browsers are used to test your mobile apps and websites. In addition, it supports scriptless/codeless testing, eliminating the need for complex scripting and making testing accessible to both technical and non-technical teams.