Having developed an application and testing its reliability before launching it in the market is essential. One can test your application either by automated testing or manual testing. Automation testing is preferred because manual testing is time-consuming and tiring for lengthy codes. Automation testing can be carried out multiple times without human intervention.
It consists of a software testing technique that uses software tools and technically compares the test cases with the desired outcome. There are two types of automation testing: functional and non-functional testing. Functional testing involves checking whether every feature of a software application operates properly, which means the tester will perform tests to determine specific outcomes. Non functional testing is carried out to ensure software application is reliable, secure, and usable. It checks for the performance of applications, such as response time, data integrity, interoperability, and user experience.
The next step is choosing the right software testing tool based on the application’s needs. A few points have to be considered before selecting the tool or framework, viz., selection of programming language, the budget of the team, the skill of the teammates, minimal maintenance, etc. In this article, we shall discuss the top 10 automation testing tools for 2024.
List of top 10 Automation testing tools
Here is the list of the top 10 Automation testing tools for the year 2024; it provides broad details of when they were launched, what are their special features, the programming languages they support, and their drawbacks or limitations.
- LambdaTest
Founded in 2017, LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that helps developers and testers ship code faster. Testers across 130+ countries and over 2 million users believe in LambdaTest.
It aims at being the best cloud test orchestration and execution platform for developers and testers, SMBs, enterprises, small teams, and open source projects. LambdaTest helps users run manual or automation testing. Users can test their native mobile application, whether Android or iOS, and mobile websites on real devices and stimulate the desired configuration.
It also offers live interactive testing on 3000+ different desktop and mobile browsers. It also provides instant access to a choice of web browser, browser version, operating system, and screen resolution. Using other frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, TestCafe, and Puppeteer, users can perform automated and visual regression tests as and when needed. For mobile app automation testing, Appium, EarlGrey, XCUITest, and Espresso are supported.
- Selenium
Founded in 2004, Selenium is the most popular open-source framework used for web automation testing. The framework comprises three significant tools: Selenium WebDriver, Selenium Grid, and Selenium IDE. Selenium WebDriver is browser-specific; it accepts the commands and processes actions on the browser. Selenium Grid is used to run tests on multiple machines, which increases the speed of execution of Selenium tests.
Selenium Integrated Development Environment is a record and playback tool that helps beginners to learn easily and maintain the results for further consideration. Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Python, and C# are a few of the programming languages it supports. Automation tests can be performed seamlessly on browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. The limitation is that it does not cover desktop apps, native mobile apps, and hybrid apps. Designed for larger enterprise organizations like insurance, banking, and medical, Selenium is fully manageable and scalable.
- Cypress
Founded in the year 2015, but in 2018 Cypress debuted itself commercially. Used by front-end developers and test automation engineers to perform API and web testing, Cypress is an end-to-end testing framework. It is widely used by the developer community, who are well-versed with JavaScript-based frameworks. It is a testing tool that concerns developers and QA engineers. It does not require any additional standard installation, configuration, testing engines, or libraries hence it is easy and fast to set up. It supports browser versions like Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Electron. It is based on Chai and Mocha and is written in JavaScript, which makes Cypress reliable and fast for every website performing tests.
- Playwright
Founded in the year 2020, Playwright is an open-source, beginner friendly automation testing tool developed and managed by Microsoft. Its role is to inject commands into the browser directly so the tests are reliable and fast. Execution speed is faster in comparison with Selenium. It is developer-friendly and provides debugging features like tracing, logging, and IDE integration. It also supports testing such as API, end-to-end, and component testing. It comes with a built-in reporter as JUnit, an HTML reporter. Supported languages are JavaScript (Node.js), Python, .NET, and C#. Browsers that work well are Chrome, Firefox, and Webkit. It is new to the market and has a still growing community. It does not work with native Safari browsers and native mobile applications. Its cloud platform testing support is limited.
- Puppeteer
Developed by Google, Puppeteer’s testers perform headless browser testing using Node Library. The program that runs in the backend and is not visible but it still has functionality is called headless browser. It has the ability to access and control DevTools Protocol and installation is also easy using npm or Yarn. . It offers rich APIs for performing automated tests, inspecting elements on a page, developing and debugging website features and also profiling performance. It is a tool that automates browsers, can be used for automating most UI tests, including keyboard and mouse movements, as well as page crawling and scraping. As puppeteer is limited to Chrome browser, cross-browser testing or scenarios requiring specific browsers are not suited. It provides support for Node.js, however community-maintained libraries with different levels of support and functionality are available for other programming languages.
- Appium
Started in the year 2012, Appium is an open source framework that conducts automated testing on different platforms like Android, iOS and Windows for web, native and hybrid applications based on client server architecture. The main concern of it is when you test a native application it shouldn’t involve an SDK or app recompilation while the choice of tools and frameworks play a vital role performing Appium mobile testing. It is easy to setup and use and provides parallel execution of test scripts. Supports multiple programming languages like Python, Java, PHP, JavaScript, etc for writing tests. Appium doesn’t support older android versions and also has limited support for hybrid application testing. It is not possible to switch applications from native to web and from web application to native.
- Espresso
Started in the year 2012, Espresso is a testing framework developed by Google for Android. Used to write simple, reliable and concise Android UI tests. The core API is predictable, small, customizable and eliminates the complexity of managing different threads. Espresso allows developers to test both Android native views as well as hybrid web views. Test cases can be written in Java or Kotlin, ensuring no new skills required running it. Adding on, it has a simple and lightweight API with three components like viewMatchers, viewActions and view Assertations. It’s a perfect tool for Android developers who are creating native applications using only Java and JUnit programming languages, this is also a limitation of Espresso.
- XCUI Test
Released in the year 2015, XCUI is a UI testing framework and it is not open source, it is provided by Apple for testing iOS applications. XCUI’s tests can be run in Xcode on the simulator which is available only for MacOS. App UI testing is performing user actions and comparing the actual results with the expected results. XCUI Test is often hailed as the best mobile app testing framework, it is easy to maintain, helps avoid flakiness, and improves performance. Languages supported are either Swift or Objective-C programming language which is a major limitation. Apple community support can easily be expected and get queries solved immediately.
- Cucumber
Started in the year 2003, it is a software testing process which deals with application’s behavior. It is commonly used as a testing tool that supports Behavior Driven Development. It supports multi-language such as Ruby, Python and Java.net which makes it versatile and can be used by teams with different programming language preferences. It bridges the gap between the technical and business language. The combination of Selenium Cucumber gives a robust framework which creates functional tests easily. It provides end-to-end testing framework support and makes use of simplified test script architecture with code reusability. It could be difficult to learn for new users for those who are not familiar with BDD or Gherkin syntax. Execution is slower than other test frameworks and requires additional resources to set up and maintain.
- Taiko
Released in the year 2017, Taiko is an open-source browser automation testing tool that has gained much popularity among developers and testers as it is user friendly. It is said to be beginner-friendly and it is also powerful enough to solve complex testing scenarios. It uses JavaScript for writing tests, it doesn’t have direct native support for other languages like Python, Java, or Ruby the developers have found ways to incorporate Taiko into their suites. Its API is designed to reduce complexity while maintaining effectiveness. It supports cross-browser testing and works on browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. It limits itself to mobile testing applications.
Conclusion
Here we have provided a list of the top 10 automation testing tools for 2024, which are used majorly by testing teams and developers. However, the selection of testing tools isn’t about choosing the most popular but it’s about alignment with the project’s needs and meeting the required aspiration. One should be aware of the teammates and their knowledge about the different languages, the budget, and project requirements if one wants to develop the program or just maintain it.