Selenide Vs. Selenium – A Detailed Comparison

Selenium over the years has become a name synonymous with automated web testing, and people who are associated with quality assurance industry and use of Selenium are also familiar with Selenide.  

Though testing with selenium has evolved a lot as a practice, selenide emerged as a wrapper tool for the Selenium web driver. With an API that is too good to connect with Selenium Web Driver, it was created to resolve the Ajax/Timeouts problems and streamline the entire test process. Talking more specifically, selenide framework was developed to fasten the test automation with Selenium Web Driver.

On the other hand, Selenium has a great library for operating a web browser, so it is just a web browser automation tool. Selenium web driver support Cross Browser Automation, Mobile browser, and native app automation also. It will help us to open the browser and copy (imitate) the user’s actions.  

In case, you’ve just started your career in automation QA, you may not be familiar with automated test script with selenium properly.  However, if you want to excel in automation testing, you should first understand the core aspects of selenium testing. This is because the present market demand is all about testing web applications faster and releasing them within weeks.     

If you already know how to perform testing with Selenium, it would be easy for you to provide the right testing services to your company’s customers, and you can easily meet their requirements & expectations.   

However, if you are struggling to get a thorough hold of selenide vs selenium with detailed understanding of factors surrounding both frameworks, we can help you get over the confusion.  

Selenide and Selenium are two different terms that appear identical, especially to those who are not so familiar with these technologies. Nevertheless, both of them differ from each other, and their definitions are very different when trying to understand their meanings.    

What is Selenium?  

Selenium is a portable framework that many companies today use to test web applications. It gives a playback tool for authoring functional tests and you need to learn a test scripting language called Selenium IDE to work on it. Though there have been the latest releases like Selenium 4 testing framework have been introduced, it is necessary that all components associated must be understood.

In addition, the selenium testing framework comes with a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in several programming languages from Groovy, C#, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Scala, and Ruby.  

The best part of these tests is you can run them against modern web browsers, and it allows you to conduct testing on various operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.   

Inside Selenium, there is a fully open-source software product line:   

• Selenium IDE;  

• Selenium Grid;  

• Selenium Server, etc.  

Selenium IDE: It is a small plug-in that supports Mozilla Firefox to write and reproduce particular user actions. It is different from Selenium Server or Selenium Grid, but keep in mind, Selenium IDE is only running with local web browsers.  

Selenium Grid: You can install Selenium Grid on a PC and interact remotely with others, mainly if they have installed Selenium Server. Additionally, it is used to start experiments on many PCs, and only one of them has the Grid.  

If you want to create a session, you have to go to the PC with Grid. After that, it will determine how much time your machine takes to load. Based on that, it gives you the necessary commands.  

All you just need to remember is that almost all machines interact with Selenium Grid, and it operates in different operating systems with popular or not popular web browsers.   

Selenium Server: It is a program that helps manage required web browsers as per the original drivers' unit.  

Furthermore, the Selenium Server should be on the same PC, and there should be a web browser to start work on it. With the help of Selenium Server, you can easy to control web browsers on a specific local PC.   

Read More Detail About Selenium In Our Latest Ebook: Testing With Selenium 

What is Selenide?   

Selenide is an automated software testing framework used to write program codes, and it helps create and send HTTP requests on Server/Grid. In addition, one of the major purposes of using Selenide framework is to create scripts so that it becomes easy to test the operation of web products.  

Moreover, it helps detect the necessary web objects, checks the events’ execution, and focuses on working with the UI (User-Interface). Both Selenium and Selenide are test automation frameworks, and you may find some similarities in their work.  

However, Selenide is developed by another project team, so it is obvious this software comes with different features compared to Selenium. It is maximally developed for creating scripts that can test the operation of web products: detecting the necessary web objects, checking the execution of events, working with the UI, and so on. 

Selenide vs Selenium 

Selenium 

Web Driver is the best tool, but it’s not a testing tool. Selenium web driver with Java is a common sight due to the extensive testing libraries available, but they do not resolve the following problems:  

• UI (User Interface) tests. 

• Tests Instability caused by: Dynamic Content, JavaScript, Ajax, Timeout, etc. 

1. UI Tests- Ideally, we write unit test cases, functional test cases, and integration test cases, etc. for our applications. In the case of a web application, we write scripts that open the page in the new browser and start clicking on buttons. 

2. Ajax and Timeouts- The test scripts we write today can use tomorrow, next week, and next month but sometimes the test scripts will fail because of the CI server. Sometimes JavaScript gets slow; some Ajax requests take a long time; and some other processes also run at the same time with our tests scripts, which occupied the server CPU space. 

To overcome the above problem we use "sleep" or "wait_until" methods in our test. But we cannot use these methods regularly. Ideally, when we write tests, then our main focus should be on business logic without the need to bother about timeouts, waiting, sleeping, WebDriver lifecycle, etc. 

Selenide 

Selenide is a tool used for automated testing and the tool created to resolve the Ajax/Timeouts problems. As we know that brilliant tools do not need documentation and Selenide is one of them. The whole work with Selenide consists of three things: 

• Open the page 

• $(find element).doAction() 

• $(find element).checkCondition() 

Selenide is as simple as: $(selector).do() 

Selenide IDE shows all possible variants once we pressed the dot after writing $("selector") 

How Selenide Framework Works? 

In Selenide, every method should wait for few seconds. So, there is no need to use the sleeps and waits commands under the code. For example, we write the below-mentioned code line. 

$("#menu").shouldHave(text("Hello")); 

In this code Selenide checks that element contains “Hello”. If not, then the element should be updated dynamically and wait for a little bit until it happens. For most web applications, the default timeout is 4 seconds. 

Selenide automation makes stability of tests by resolving Ajax and Timeout issues. It provides below mentioned API’s: 

• Ajax Support 

• Smart Waiting 

• Convenience Methods 

• Automated Screenshots 

• Transparent Web Driver 

Differentiating the Selenide and Selenium with Example: 

In selenium Web Driver, we write 

By username = By.name("username"); 

driver.findElement(username).click(); 

In case of Selenide, we can simply write 

By username = By.byName("username"); 

$(username).click(); 

Selenide has an inbuilt mechanism for WebDriverWait, so waiting for Ajax call is easy. We can expect stable testing for an app with Ajax calls. 

With updated dependencies on Selenide 6.11.1, Selenide has so much to offer, no matter which test framework you use. 

Visit selenide.org to know what other benefits you could yield with Selenide.

Tools Similar to Selenide: 

Selenium WebDriver tool is not a testing tool, is a browser driving tool. So that’s why several tools are created over Selenium tool like FluentLenium, Fluent-selenium, HTMLElements, Thucydides, Yandex, Watir-webdriver. Selenide is one of them and it is created for writing concise, expressive, clean code and stable UI tests in Java. 

Which is Better – Selenide or Selenium?  

Many people use the Selenide tool over the Selenium Web Driver tool because Selenide is specially developed for test automation using Selenium WebDriver. And, the other reason to use Selenide over Selenium is that it comes with good APIs that you can connect with Selenium WebDriver.    

On the flip side, when it comes to why to use Selenium? It allows using a great library for operating a web browser, the latest updates like Selenium 4 becomes the right choice because it is specifically designed for testing web-based applications and is popularly known as the web browser automation tool.  

However, when it comes to compatibility, Selenium WebDriver provides support for Cross Browser Automation, Native App Automation, Mobile Browser Automation, and many more. Furthermore, with Selenium WebDriver, one can easy to open the browser and copy (imitate) the user actions.  

We hope that the above article enabled you to understand the details of Selenium vs Selenide comparison. For more details or queries surrounding Selenium automation, Selenide or selenium testing services, or integrating any test framework to your automation testing initiatives, feel free to reach our experts at BugRaptors!