Selenium and Tricentis Tosca are competing test automation solutions. Selenium is open source, and the most popular script-based test automation tool in the world; users work in Selenium IDE, which supports its own scripting language, Selenese. Tricentis Tosca is available at cost but provides a scriptless, no-code, model-based approach to test automation. Selenium and Tricentis Tosca present similar automation features, but they can be used together in a test suite by test management tools such as Tricentis qTest.
Selenium and Tosca are both used predominantly in enterprises, however Selenium is often deployed at mid-size companies as well. Given that it is open source, Selenium can be learned by anyone willing to take the time.
Features
There are many reasons to deploy Tosca or Selenium (or both) in agile test suites.
Beyond simply being open source, Selenium can support tests written in a variety of programming languages including Java, Ruby, Ruby, C#, PHP, etc., as well as its own Selense language, making it accessible to devs. It supports testing a variety of web UI components, and supports cross-browser testing. Despite being scripted, Selenium is relatively easy to use, and also supports parallel testing.
The primary reason for using Tosca is its major selling point: it is scriptless, or no-code. As easy as Selenium might be, it still requires scripting. Users enjoy how easy Tosca makes it to design tests, and how easy it is to integrate Tosca into a CI / CD pipeline. Also, Tosca can be used to test web, cloud, and desktop applications.Tosca can automate API testing, and offers integrations with Postman and SoapUI. Selenium cannot be used to automate API testing.
Limitations
A few reasons exist to consider looking elsewhere for a test automation tool.
Selenium cannot be used to automate testing of desktop applications, only web applications through browser automations. Because it is scripted, it is accessible only to programmers, and because it is open source it lacks enterprise support of any kind. It may be easy to use for what it is, but learning to use it is a barrier for many. Selenium also lacks powerful internal reporting features.
Tosca’s downsides are few, but first among them is the cost, particularly when open source and free alternatives exist. Also, because it is scriptless, Tosca has the opposite problem Selenium has: competent programmers are sometimes frustrated by it, citing a lack of flexibility and control for complex test automations. There is also a learning curve to arrive at fully understanding the UI.
Pricing
Selenium is open source and free to use. Tricentis Tosca pricing is not published. Tricentis offers cloud licensing which provides a testing environment hosted by Tricentis, and on-premise licensing. Tricentis suggests cloud licensing can reduce costs because it allows the user’s partners in testing to use testing infrastructure without having to provision additional server resources. Tricentis also provides checkout licenses (i.e. temporary use licenses for a pool of potential users held for specific use cases), or custom licensing for special and limited scenarios.
