The debate of UFT vs Selenium – Which is better has been around for a while now. This article explores a comparison between UFT vs Selenium and helps testers to understand how Selenium is more advantageous than QTP/UFT.
Let’s first understand the fundamentals of UFT and Selenium.
Manual testing of any web-based application consumes significant time, resources, and money. It is not possible to rapidly test applications with manual intervention alone. Automation comes into the picture here to reduce or eliminate manual testing as much as possible. There are numerous tools available to facilitate automated testing of websites, with Selenium and QTP/UFT being two frequently used ones.
What is QTP/UFT?
QTP, now called UFT, is a tool designed to perform automated functional testing seamlessly without monitoring the system in intervals.
QTP was renamed as UFT (Unified Functional Testing) by Microfocus. The tool is primarily used for functional, regression, and service testing. Using UFT, testers can automate user actions on a web or client based computer application and test and identify bugs that may appear when those actions are being performed.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source tool that automates web browsers. It provides a single interface that lets you write test scripts in programming languages like Ruby, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Perl, Python, and C#, among others. A browser driver then executes these scripts on a browser-instance on your device (more on this in a moment).
UFT vs Selenium
The below table explains in detail the difference between UFT vs Selenium.
| Features | Selenium | QTP/UFT |
| Type of Software | Set of APIs | Desktop Application |
| Flexibility | Runs across all the browsers | Supports only Windows |
| License | Open-source | Licensed |
| Environment | Allows all additional plugins | Supports SAP, Oracle and includes no add-ons to the software |
| Browser Area Accessibility | Controls the visible area of the browser where the page is loaded | Controls the menu and toolbars of the browser and all other website toolkits with various formats |
| Test Execution | Can run tests synchronously with the integration of test frameworks such as TestNG | Must be combined with Micro Focus ALM to execute tests synchronously. ALM is a paid framework |
| Object Repository | Doesn’t have any such repository | Comes with a built-in repository |
| Test Execution Performance | Requires fewer system resources and can be used in Windows or Linux VM. Linux VM is lighter than Windows VM | Requires more system resources. It can only run on Windows VM, which uses more resources and needs more maintenance |
| Supported Technology | Struggles while automating SAP, Salesforce, mainframe applications | Supports nearly every major software application and environment, including SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, mainframes, embedded frameworks, headless browsers, and much more |
| Programming Language | Supports mature Object-Oriented Languages like Java | Supports only VBScript. Thus, the Object-Oriented Approach to automation becomes challenging with QTP/UFT |
How is Selenium better than QTP/UFT
Selenium is an open-source testing tool and it doesn’t require a license, its a cross-platform framework. It works on different platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac whereas QTP/UFT supports only Windows.
Selenium offers web automation testing at less cost compared to QTP also it supports JAVA,
.NET, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and many other programming languages whereas QTP/UFT only supports VB script.
It must be noted that Selenium is the most frequently used test automation framework. This is not just because it is open source, but also because of the plethora of features it offers to testers seeking to automate websites for quality assurance activities.
Case Study:
Considering a Project, initially was build to test using QTP later was switched to Selenium due to the below challenges:
- Browser Version: QTP does not support testing the application in different browsers, it only supported IE. Web based alerts/pop up could not be verified in other browsers except for IE.
- Cost of Testing: QTP/UFT required to purchase each license for every individual which has increased the overall Testing cost compared to Selenium which is open source. Additional features/Add On’ had to be purchased in QTP/UFT whereas in Selenium, these additional features can be used importing Jar Files which are available at free of cost.
- Supporting of Complex Features: Some complex features such as Import/Exporting files could not be tested easily with QTP/UFT however, they could be handled using Selenium.
- Batch Execution and Report Generation: Batch Execution and Report generation using Selenium was much simpler and effective using Selenium compared to QTP/UFT.
Considering all the above Pros of Selenium, test script building was switched to Selenium from QTP/UFT also with this transition, cost of testing has been reduced, scripts were able to be executed in different browsers and some of the complex tasks could be handled easily.
Also, the process of execution of scripts automatically using GIT is in the process of implementation.
