The Unified Functional Testing tool is a unified solution for GUI and API functional testing. It’s a commercial tool by MicroFocus. It can be used to test web, desktop and mobile applications. In this blog, we bring out the major differences between Unified Functional testing tool and Selenium open source testing tools.
What Makes UFT Top the Commercial Testing Tool Market
Mercury Interactive’s WinRunner was the most successful testing tool between 1995 and 2005. The company predicted technological changes proactively and released QTP (QuickTest Professional) an advanced tool to test the latest technologies in 1998. All WinRunner markets shifted to QTP. Though there are many other commercial tools available in market QTP manages to be the best due to its simplicity in creating tests.
HP acquired mercury interactive and created a new tool UFT by combining two testing tools QTP and Service Test. QTP is for GUI testing, Service Test is for API testing. Later mobile application testing capability was added to the UFT. Because of years of active customers, continuous updates and support, it continues to be the best commercial testing tool market.
Differences Between UFT and Selenium
1. License
- UFT is a commercial testing software and has different licensing methods: seat and concurrent. Seat costs $3200/year, while concurrent costs $4500/year. There’s also an execution license of $2300 used only for execution of tests in the maintenance phase. It also offers a 60-day free trial.
- Selenium is free and open source. Anyone can download and modify as per their testing needs.
2. Automation Technology Support
- UFT can automate almost all the latest technologies, including Web, Desktop and Mobile Applications. UFT is also used to automate testing Web Services.
- Selenium can automate only web applications.
3. OS Support
- UFT supports only Windows OS for creating and executing Automation Tests.
- Selenium automation tests can be created and executed on Windows, Linux and MAC.
4. Browser Support
- Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and PhantomJS browsers are supported by both UFT and selenium. UFT supports executing tests on Safari browser through remote MAC agent.
5. WebUI Technology Support
- UFT also supports Web UI frameworks like Dojo, GWT, ASP.NET AJAX, YUI, jQuery UI, SalesForce, Ext-JS, Angular, SiebelOpenUI, ag-Grid, UI Grid, React, Electron and Chromium Embedded Frameworks.
- Selenium can automate any web application. But there’s no default support to work with different Web UI technologies. Automation developer should explore and integrate supporting libraries. For example, to automate Angular web applications we can use ngWebDriver libraries. (Learn how to test angular applications using Selenium)
6. Programming Language Support
- UFT support only VBScripting, whereas Selenium officially supports Java, C#, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. Also, some third party developers give support for Perl, PHP, Haskell, Objective-C, R, Dart, Tcl and Elixir languages.
7. Cloud Execution
- There are many providers for Selenium to execute tests on a cloud. Almost every cloud testing vendor supports selenium test execution.
- The UFT has its own cloud based automated functional testing solution called StormRunner. The fact is that it also supports selenium cloud test execution.
8. Features
- UFT offers its own powerful recording feature, IDE and Rich UI to create tests, Data Driving Technique to develop and execute tests.
- Selenium is just a library. There are many free and commercial IDE’s available to create selenium by just integrating its library. It doesn’t offer anything other than automating a browser. For different needs, use libraries that are available in the market. For creating tests a unit testing framework is required, for data driving and result generation some other libraries are required. But all the external libraries are trusted, powerful and most of these are opensource.
9. Development and Execution Time
- The UFT has many good features to create tests using recordings or by using drag and drop features. There are many features which are useful to create tests in minutes.
- There is Selenium IDE which is newly introduced to create tests using recording and with some UI features. But this comes as browser plugins aren't inbuilt with programming IDE. So we have to export recorded tests into webdriver programming format and edit them in any programming IDE like eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio…etc.
Comparatively, creating tests using UFT is at least 50% faster than selenium. Both UFT and selenium support parallel and cloud execution. But UFT’s parallel execution depends on number of licenses. That’s how selenium is more powerful in completing test execution.
(To know more about choosing a Test Automation Software and difference between Opensource and commercial software, Discover More. )
Conclusion
Selenium and UFT both are top testing tools with respect to their opensource and commercial market. But the main difference is the cost. In recent years UFT added parallel and cloud execution. MicroFocus also introduced another tool called LeanFT (now UFTPro) which supports multiple OS and languages like selenium. By considering all these there are not many differences between UFT and Selenium other than license cost. Anyone can use these tools depending on available resources, the client’s willingness to buy commercial software, and automated technology.