Comparison between Selenium and QTP - the New Generation Software Testing Tools

The IT sector is aware of the emergence of QuickTest Professional (QTP) & Selenium as the popular choice of testers & programmers for their test automation effort.

First of all let us have a quick overview of both the software testing tools, before going into a broad comparison among the functionality of the two.

Quick Overview :

QTP is automated testing tool meant for performing functional and regression testing of various software applications and environments through a user interface like native GUI or web interface. It uses VBScript as the scripting language for specifying a test procedure, & for manipulating the objects & controls of the AUT. It supports a keyword and a powerful graphical user interface.

Selenium is an open source software-testing tool that had been developed by Jason Huggins & his team. This is released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without any charge. It provides a record / playback function for authoring the tests meant for web applications. It offers a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in many popular languages like C#, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby etc. Selenium works on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. Many additional projects have emerged out of the parent Selenium like Selenium Grid, Selenium IDE, Selenium Remote Control and Selenium WebDriver having different abilities that provide a boost to the parent Selenium.

Now let us make a broad comparison among the two tools

Selenium	QTP
Open source	Paid tool
Works on all OS	Works on Windows
Tests only Web applications	Tests web and desktop applications
Works on almost all browsers	Works on Firefox 3.5.x and IE
No object repository	Has got an object repository
IDE sometimes does not record some events	Recording is a little reliable
Core engine is java script and is very strong	Core engine is not java script based

Conclusion:

Our objective had not been to favor one at the cost of the second. It is a matter of convenience for the testers & programmers to select a tool that suits their requirements best.

Lastly both these tools have their own advantages & shortcomings, while it all depends upon the users who truly know how to exploit them to their best advantage.