Azure DevOps Server vs. Katalon vs. Selenium

Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.

Incentivized

Katalon TestOps is well suited for an oraganization who want to organize their automation collections and have everything in one place. It provides good insight on test runs, failures and also helps in defect tracking. It is extremely easy to schedule and run test suites automatically. With the help of test history, it becomes easier to triage the report and identify if it is a product issue or a test flakiness. Also with the automation run scheduling features with custom options, user do not have to manually trigger the runs and just run the scheduler to do the job.

Incentivized

When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.

Incentivized

• Reporting Integration- Azure boards provides Kanban and other dashboard, their templates for easy management of project.
• Project Pipeline- easy integration and development of CI/CD pipelines, helped in testing, releasing project artifacts.
• Version Control- Integration with Git and code IDE made it easy to share, review our code, fix bugs and do testing.

Incentivized

• Easy to setup and quick to get started: As Katalon comes with built-in features a new automation tester can automate easily. Script creation time is quick.
• Test Analytics: Katalon also provides analytics which tells you the pattern of your automated tests at a different instance of time.
• Third Party Integration: Katalon provides amazing integration with 3rd party tools like JIRA, ALM, GIT, JENKINS, etc.
• Image-based testing: Katalon also provides inbuilt image based test automation.

Incentivized

• For any web based UI automation, Selenium is the best tool out there to automate your tests.
• It supports multiple coding languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C# etc.. to choose from.
• There is a huge community of users and can get many answers on StackOverFlow.
• It has lot of other plugins to make your tests even more efficient.

Incentivized

• Can add more build templates for specific technology requirements
• Can have more features in dashboards which can help dev teams stream line their tasks and priorities
• Can have raise alarm feature in case of any sort of failure in devops pipeline execution

Incentivized

• Integration with Azure is painstakingly slow as it takes too much time to upload reports to Azure. When raised with the support team i was advised to contact Microsoft who promptly and correctly replied that its an issue with the katalon plugin.
• Non Responsive Customer Support. Several mails were replied late.
• The Desktop app uses too much memory when booting up and running tests even on a 16gb RAM.

• Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
• Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
• Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.

Incentivized

Because we are a Microsoft Gold Partner we utilize most of their software and we have so much invested in Team Foundation Server now it would take a catastrophic amount of time and resources to switch to a different product.

Incentivized

We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.

Incentivized

For standard users the interface is friendly. but if you are a manager some tools are a little confusing to use, like the query system that you always need to create from scratch. Templates should be more helpful for queries and for standard procedures that you need to duplicate PBIs over time. The search history of Work Items is a little painful to use.

Incentivized

Due to the slowness, there is an intermediate timeout. There is no other problem.

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For those who are unfamiliar with coding, there is a bit of a learning curve. There is plenty of helpful documentation and resources but it can take a little time to get the software up and running. Once you get the hang of how Selenium works, and what it can do, you realize how many things you can use it for, and how many processes you can automate.

Incentivized

I have not had to use the support for Azure DevOps Server. There have never been any issues where I was not able to figure it out or quickly resolve. Our Scrum Master has used support before though, and the service has always been prompt and clear with a customer-focus

Incentivized

I love the support. They have provided answers and solutions for most of our questions or doubts that could come up. They also have provided basic tutorials on how to get familiarized with the program.

Incentivized

The Selenium app has a pretty fat community of users. For the problems we are experiencing, we are primarily receiving support from these communities. In addition, there is widespread service support. Instant support is given to the problems we experience when we need Online support. We and our team are happy to provide this support, especially before important deployment processes

Do research beforehand and, if possible, do a trial run before implementing into production environment.

Incentivized

We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.

Incentivized

In my opinion, DevOps covers the development process end to end way better than Jira or GitHub. Both competitors are nice in their specific fields but DevOps provides a more comprehensive package in my opinion. It is still crazy to see that the whole suite can be used for free. The productivity increase we realized with DevOps is worth real money!

Incentivized

Katalon Studio is above both the tools is due to its codeless test automation feature and having API, desktop, web, and mobile automation in one place but obviously there is room for improvement when desktop automation is of primary importance in the automation.

Incentivized

At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.

Incentivized

• It has streamlined the pipeline and project management for our agile effort.
• It has helped our agile team get organized since that is a new methodology being leveraged within the Enterprise.
• The calendar has improved visibility into different OOOs across the project team since we all come from different departments across the larger organization.

Incentivized

• Support can be better: As mentioned before, katlon community is still growing but is currently a small community. If you are stuck, its hard to find help in the community and one has to reach out to the support for help. This takes a while before you can get solution to your problem.
• Result upload takes little longer time: It is been observed that uploading tests results takes little longer.
• Sometimes it gets hard to integrate: Since this is fairly a new tool, requires lot of learning curve to get the job done effectively.

Incentivized

• There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
• This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
• We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
• We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium

Incentivized