Choosing Selenium over other tools

Selenium is a great tool for testing web applications and interacting with the application like a real user would. It uses a real browser to click, type, and fill out forms. It is as close to a human user as you can get. It's the perfect tool for testing the flow of the web application from start to finish.

Nothing can beat the free price tag! While there are other commercial products that have more advanced features available for purchase, they tend to run into tens of thousands of dollars per license. Selenium is so cheap that you will be able to finish this book and build a whole test suite without spending another dollar.

Selenium is Open source software (OSS), but this means more than "it is free". As with other OSS, with Selenium, you don't just get the product but you get a whole community; you become part of the family. The majority of Selenium developers cannot wait to help someone who is in need, or to share some really great workaround for a difficult problem they ran into. This sure beats paying for expensive and underwhelming technical support you get with a commercial product.

Selenium is incredibly flexible; because it is Java-based, you can run it on most operating systems or browsers. You can even use it to test iOS and Android browsers. On top of that, you can run it in "headless mode" with an emulation browser, or set up a grid to increase your capacity, but we will cover more on these topics later in the book.