TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Instana

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/AInstana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.

    $75

    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)

    Selenium

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/ASelenium is open source software for browser automation, primarily used for functional, load, or performance testing of applications.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Editions & Modules
    Essentials
    $20
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    Standard
    $75
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    Self-Hosted
    $93.80
    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of IBM Instana and Selenium
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Selenium
    -
    Ratings
    Remote monitoring9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network device monitoring5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Server Monitoring8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-device monitoring5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automated alerts and notifications9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Management Tasks
    Comparison of Management Tasks features of IBM Instana and Selenium
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    Selenium
    -
    Ratings
    Software and hardware inventory6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based automation4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of IBM Instana and Selenium
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    Selenium
    -
    Ratings
    Performance data reports8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reporting4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data visualization8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
    Risk analysis4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation Testing
    Comparison of Automation Testing features of IBM Instana and Selenium
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    -
    Ratings
    Selenium
    10.0
    1 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Record and Automate00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Multi-Browser Testing00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Test Management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Integrated Version Control00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Object Recognition00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Data-Driven Testing00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Testing Reports & Analytics00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.8 out of 10
    BrowserStack
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    BlazeMeter
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    Tricentis Tosca
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    9.2
    (55 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    9.2
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    8.3
    (11 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSelenium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    Well-suited for an org with a large application base, where many microservices are created and destroyed daily. IBM Instana doesn't require any manual configuration, so deploying the Instana agents takes very little time. Data capture from IBM Instana is highly granular and can detect even short spikes lasting a few seconds. Not suitable for legacy applications where there will be rarely any changes. They can use a simpler monitoring mechanism. Also, highly dense data capturing can sometimes overload the information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
    • Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
    • Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
    • Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
    • Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
    • Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
    • Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
    • Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Usability
    IBM
    IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    IBM
    IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    Instana is much more robust and modern compared to our previous product which was AppDynamics. We compared Dynatrace and Datadog and they were very similar in many aspects. The licensing simplicity with Instana and our existing relationship with IBM made it a much more enticing option and accelerated the adoption timeline
    Read full review
    Open Source
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
    • Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
    • Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
    • increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Open Source
    • 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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots