Best Automation Tools for UI Testing
Over the past few years, at least a dozen completely new tools for automating user interface testing have appeared. Since each tool has its own direction and strategy, it is difficult to understand where to start.
Any UI tester can claim that UI testing is relatively simple if nothing changes in your GUI, but the problem is that everything is always changing. Depending on the solution you choose, the result can be either a breakout or a failure with confusing workflows.
We offer a couple of recommendations for choosing the right tool:
Ease of use
The automation tool you choose should be easy to use by people from various technical and non-technical backgrounds. It needs to be intuitive, and tests should be simple to write, understand and execute across multiple projects.
Extensibility
With applications becoming more complex with the use of advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain, and microservices, being able to create automated tests quickly has become a necessity for teams. Thus, codeless automation tools have become popular, helping anyone write easy and stable automated tests.
Cross-browser and device support
The chosen tool must provide the ability to write one single test in the IDE and run it across different mobile devices, browsers, and OS versions seamlessly and in parallel.
CI/CD Integration
With the growing popularity of agile development processes such as Devops, DevSecOps, ATDD and BDD, it is important to ensure seamless CI/CD integration. Automatic tests should be performed at each code registration, as well as periodically throughout the day to ensure that critical system functions are still working properly and that new mixed code doesn’t disrupt other application functions.
Reporting
The chosen tool needs to have different reporting capabilities and dashboards to quickly show what tests passed and failed, how many tests ran, the health of your automated suites, and of course the ability to export these results and share them with your teams.
Here are the top test automation tools that are believed to best address the challenges in automation.
- Selenium
- SoapUI
- Postman
- Apache JMeter
- Cypress
- Protractor
- Puppeteer
- Appium
- WebdriverIO
- Cucumber
Let’s now have a more detailed look at them
1. Selenium
Selenium is the most common tool when it comes to the automation of testing. For developers and testers with experience and skills in programming and writing scripts, Selenium offers flexibility that is missing in many other test automation tools and frameworks. Users can write test scripts in a variety of languages (such as Java, Groovy, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby and Perl) that work in a variety of system environments (Windows, Mac, Linux) and browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE and Headless).
To use Selenium effectively, users must have advanced programming skills and spend a lot of time creating frameworks and libraries necessary for automation. This is the main disadvantage of Selenium, which is also found in other tools built to automate code free tests such as Katalon Studio.
Website: https://selenium.dev/
License: Open Source
2. SoapUI
SoapUI is not a tool to automate web or mobile application testing, but it can be chosen to test APIs and services. The tool provides a wide range of functions for testing the API with many advanced features, including:
- Generate tests by simple drag-and-drop, with a pointer and click
- Scripts can be reused
- Asynchronous testing
- Efficient testing using data from files and databases
Website: https://www.soapui.org/
License: Free — $709 per year.
3. Postman
Postman is another automation tool designed for API testing. Users can install this tool as a browser extension or as a desktop application on Mac, Linux, Windows. It is popular not only among API testers for automating testing, but also among developers. It is, in fact, an environment for API development and testing.
Features of the tool:
- User-friendly and easy to use user interface
- Supporting both automated and exploratory testing
- Complete set of functions for API development, debugging, testing, documentation and publishing
- Accepting Swagger and RAML API formats
Website: https://www.getpostman.com/
License: Free — $216 per user per year
4. Apache JMeter
JMeter is an open-source tool designed for test loading and performance measurement. However, the tool is now also used for API and services testing, especially for API performance.
Highlights of the tool include:
- Lightweight with a simple and easy-to-use user interface
- Test results can be replayed
- Support CSV files to set values for API parameters
- Support integration with CI tools such as Jenkins. JMeter is often used as a part of CI and DevOps toolchains
Website: https://jmeter.apache.org/
License: Open-source
5. Cypress
Cypress is a newcomer to the testing market, which is gaining popularity both among testers and developers. It can test everything that works in a browser. Cypress has open source code and a very active community. Cypress tests are written in JavaScript, but don’t let that scare you, in case you are unfamiliar with JavaScript, working with Cypress commands is quite intuitive in most cases.
You can use Cypress:
- Unit-testing
- Integration testing
- Complex testing
Website: https://www.cypress.io/
License: Open-source
6. Protractor
The Protractor is an automation testing tool for web applications testing; combining powerful technologies such as Jasmine, Selenium Webdriver, Node.js etc.
The Protractor testing tool is an end to end behavior-driven testing framework designed keeping Angular JS applications in mind. Even though that might sound like Protractor won’t work with non-angular JS applications, it does.
It works with both Angular and non-Angular JS applications equally well.
Website: https://protractor.angular.io/
License: Open-source
7. Puppeteer
Puppeteer is an open source Node.js library developed by Google with wide support for almost any action in Google’s Chrome browser. The basic idea is an API at the high level that allows us to automate actions in either of the Google browsers, Chrome and Chromium. For those non-Chrome stalwarts, Mozilla is also implementing Puppeteer in Firefox, and we hear they are about 85% done with that project.
By the way, you can read a story about our experience of using Puppeteer for Webscraping here.
Website: https://pptr.dev/
License: Open-source
8. Appium
Appium is one of the tools for automation of testing with open source, mainly intended for mobile applications. It supports automation of native, hybrid and mobile web applications created for iOS and Android.
Features of the tool:
- Automates any mobile app from any language and any test framework
- Testing native apps doesn’t require SDK or recompiling of the app
- Drives iOS, Android, and even Windows apps using the WebDriver protocol
Website: http://appium.io
License: Open-source
9. WebdriverIO
WebdriverIO uses its own approach in using Selenium WebDriver functionality. This library is intended for Node.js. Among the features of this tool we can highlight the following:
- It has a very simple and readable syntax
- Flexible and expandable library
- An extensive community of developers that has created plug-ins and extensions to increase WebDriverIO usage
Web site: https://webdriver.io/
License: Open-source
10. Cucumber
Cucumber is an open-source Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tool. It has an impressive list of users including PayPal and Canon. It supports languages like Ruby, Java, Scala, Groovy, etc.
Features of the tool:
- The code can be executed on different frameworks such as Selenium
- The test code is written in simple Gherkin language
- Supported languages are Ruby, Java, Scala, Groovy, etc.
Website: https://cucumber.io
License: Free
