Software automation testing is a testing method to execute tests through automation testing tools. It consumes less time and human effort in comparison to Manual testing. The software automation testing enters test data into the system, compares actual and expected results, and produces detailed reports. 

 

Automation software testing can be achieved by Automation testing tools or by writing test scripts. For repetitive testing or those tests that are hard to do manually, we use automation testing. 

 

Automation testing tools help to automate data sets, defect logging, GUI interaction, etc. It’s used for both functional and non-functional testing. Here are the best automation tools, that help in automating the testing process and the best in the market.

 

1. Selenium
2. Cypress
3. Puppeteer
4. Playwright

 

1. Selenium: Selenium is an open-source automation testing tool that is widely used in the IT industry. It is mainly used for browser testing. It enables records of testing web applications and runs multiple scripts across different browsers. One can run test scripts in various languages; eg. PHP, Perl, Python, NodeJS, JAVA, C#, etc. on a single interface of Selenium. Selenium supports multiple Operating Systems like Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a very large community of testers so the updates are very frequent.

 

2. Cypress: Cypress is an open-source automation testing tool too, it also provided under MIT licenses. Anything that runs on the browser, Cypress does fast, reliable, and easy testing. Cypress takes screenshots when we run any tests and you can see that by just hovering over it and see what had happened in each step. It automatically reloads on every change. It doesn’t have quite a large community of testers but resources are pretty decent and communication is very effective.

 

3. Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node library. It provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the Devtools protocol. It can use for test automation in modern web applications. It takes screenshots of web pages, scrapes websites for data, and automates the interaction of web pages. That speed ups the tests we like to perform on the website, automatically.

 

4. Playwright: Playwright is an open-source JavaScript library used for end-to-end automation testing. It gets started instantly and automates with auto waits.

 

Here is a quick comparison between Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, and Playwright. 

 

Cross-Browser

Selenium: Runs everywhere.

Cypress: Only Chrome/Firefox

Puppeteer: Only Chrome/Firefox

Playwright: Chrome/Safari/Firefox

 

Multiple Tabs + Frames

Selenium: Supported with bad switch API

Cypress: No real support

Puppeteer: Intuitive API

Playwright: Intuitive API

 

Test Creation Speed

Selenium: Yes

Cypress: Yes

Puppeteer: Yes

Playwright: Yes

 

Trusted Actions

Selenium: Yes

Cypress: No support (can use Puppeteer plugin)

Puppeteer: Yes

Playwright: Yes

 

Parallelism Grids and Infrastructure

Selenium: Yes (managed, costly) or build your own solution

Cypress: Either on their closed source paid cloud or you'll have to build your own.

Puppeteer: Usually people build their own (will change soon)

Playwright: Usually people build their own (will change soon)

 

Performance

Selenium: It’s fast enough

Cypress: It’s fast enough

Puppeteer: It’s fast enough

Playwright: It’s fast enough

 

Stability

Selenium: Complex Automatic WaitFor mechanism

Cypress: Complex mechanism that doesn’t work with frames

Puppeteer: WaitFor for certain things, but have to WaitFor manually for others

Playwright: Better WaitFor for certain things, but have to WaitFor manually for others

 

Smart(er) Locators

Selenium: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways

Cypress: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways

Puppeteer: No support for selecting elements in multiple ways

Playwright: Very promising start of supporting custom selector engines.

 

Debugging

Selenium: Debugging remote grids relies on the grid provider

Cypress: Debugging is not like writing simple JavaScript, it's chaining promises.

Puppeteer: Writing and debugging JavaScript from your IDE

Playwright: Writing and debugging JavaScript from your IDE

 

Documentation and Resources

Selenium: Very large community. Many testers.

Cypress: Not a big community, but effective communication

Puppeteer: A lot of tutorials and reading material but small community

Playwright: Cause of keep changing APIs, there are out of date documents and data.