Katalon vs. Postman vs. Selenium

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

Postman is good for organising your API credentials, vendor settings, environments etc. It's also a good way of getting stared with APIs as you get to use a GUI which can help you understand what we mean by a 'body' or 'bearer token'. I think people generally gravitate towards GUI tools for getting started in a new technology area.

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

• 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

• It has opened a door for me to explore more out of it, as it is associated with so many APIs that I never felt any difficulty in finding the right API template, which are well organized and easily available.
• It is very secure to use and provides great services which are user-friendly.
• Due to this software I have got rid of the excessive emails and the slack channels, Now I am using my own private API and even it give me an option to produce my personal Postman’s API Builder from its Private API Network and this features has shared my excessive workload.

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

• 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.

• Wherever you need to automate tests that involve database verification or rely on data from databases, Postman is less suitable.
• Postman's disc usage is extremely high, and it occasionally causes the computer to fade.
• It doesn't have the ability to generate random data. To achieve randomness in my tests, I've been working around scripts.

• 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

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

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

Incentivized

1. Friendly user friendly - when I started using Postman, I was a beginner to the API world, and it gave me a friendly view to begin its usage 2. Postman offers many features, including API testing, monitoring, documentation, and mock servers 3. Environment variables simplify testing across multiple environments (dev, prod) without repetitive configuration.

Incentivized

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 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

There is a lot of in-depth documentation for Postman available online, including detailed guides with screenshots and videos. They provide example APIs for new users to explore while learning how to use the tool. Generally, bugs in the client are quickly addressed through frequent free updates. Community and professional support options are available - most of the time, the free/community level support is adequate

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

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

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

Previous to using Postman, I would either use browser tools directly, or write an in-house tool to send requests. Postman eliminates that need while providing a much better experience and more features. At the base level, Postman is as simple as typing in the address as you would in a browser. Authentication can be provided simply as well.

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

• 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

• Postman is free (although there's a paid tier that offers more features) so using it for testing APIs comes with little to no risk (besides learning curve).
• The learning curve is a little steep for non-developer users, but developers should find it easy to pick up and use right out of the box, so to speak.

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