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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    OpenText Silk Central

    Score7 out of 10
    N/AFormerly from Micro Focus and earliler from Borland, unified test management with OpenText™ Silk Central drives reuse and efficiency. It gives users the visibility to control application readiness.N/A

    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
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Considered Both Products
    OpenText
    No answer on this topic
    Open Source
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    18 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    17 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    Features
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Test Management
    Comparison of Test Management features of OpenText Silk Central and Selenium
    Feature
    OpenText Silk Central
    8.0
    1 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Selenium
    -
    Ratings
    Centralized test management10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Manage test hosts and schedules7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Map tests to user stories9.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Test execution reporting6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation Testing
    Comparison of Automation Testing features of OpenText Silk Central and Selenium
    Feature
    OpenText Silk Central
    -
    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
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    BrowserStack
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    BlazeMeter
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Tricentis Tosca
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.2
    (55 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.3
    (11 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    OpenText Silk CentralSelenium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    OpenText
    We didn't just select Borland Silk Central randomly. In the selection process, we actually evaluated in total 26 available test management tools in the market. We sent surveys to all potential users in the department to collect their wish list of our next management tool, converted them to a criteria list, and used that list to evaluate all 26 tools. We reduced the possible candidate tools to five and organized a small committee to pick the final three. Top management then checked their price tags and selected Borland Silk Central. Based on this evaluation process, I would say Borland Silk Central is suitable to an organization which has no more than 60 testers; needs both manual tests and automated tests; needs on-line support; needs a low learning curve and has a limited budget. My personal view is that this tool reaches the balance points among ease-of-use, budget and support.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Pros
    OpenText
    • Borland Silk Central is good for the users to associate test requirements, test cases, execution plans and test reports together. Each asset (test case, requirement, etc...) provides links for the users to jump to other assets in a click, and the users can jump back and forth between two assets.
    • Borland Silk Central is also good in test automation. Although Micro Focus does provide a client tool for test automation, the users don't really need it to automate the tests. In our case, we are using Python to automate the tests and use a batch file to launch tests, and in Borland Silk Central we just call that batch file from server side. The test result is automatically fed back to Silk server.
    • Micro Focus also publishes the schema of the database behind Borland Silk Central, so it is very easy to extend its function beyond its original design. Moreover, because its schema is published, we can easily retrieve and process its data for business intelligence purpose.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Cons
    OpenText
    • On the other hand, the plugins of Borland Silk Central with third-party tools are programmed poorly. In our case, the plugins for JIRA have a lot of limitations and were almost unusable in our test environment. (They did improve the plugins a little bit later, however.)
    • The tech support people are located in UK, so frequently it is difficult to get a hold of these guys due to different time zones. Also, most of them obviously don't have enough experience and sometimes drove us nuts in emergency situations.
    • The last thing I feel is that Micro Focus possibly doesn't provide enough manpower to maintain Borland Silk Central. There are tons of feature requests for Borland Silk Central pending there. Although they have frequent hot fixes every few months, they don't digest these requests quick enough.
    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
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    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
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    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
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    Support Rating
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    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
    OpenText
    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
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    Alternatives Considered
    OpenText
    We had evaluated, for example:
    • IBM Collaborate Suite - it is way too complicated and the learning curve is too high.
    • HP Quality Center - it is OK but a little bit expensive.
    • TestLink, Squash TM and other open source tools: The capabilities of open source tools just can't compare to commercial tools. Although we can modify the source code to improve the tool, we are just test engineers, not developers.
    • Zephyr: Our testers simply didn't like its UI - too weird.
    Incentivized
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    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
    OpenText
    • Borland Silk Central provides a centralized test platform for multiple test departments in the company, so now all of the departments know what each of them is doing. In turn, all departments can coordinate with each other to reduce the duplicated test items and increase the overall test efficiency.
    • Also, Borland Silk Central enables the users to publish the test procedure (steps) of each test case so all the users can know how each test case is performed. It is not like what we had before, the test procedures resided in difference place from Excel to Google drive or some other weird locations.
    • Also, because all departments are using Borland Silk Central, all testers of the departments have better communication regarding testing methods. In the past, the department used different test management tools and it was hard for the testers to understand each other's testing methods.
    • Finally, because all departments share BorlandSilk Central, they also share the same set of reports published to Atlassian Confluence, so now they use the same set of reports to evaluate the test progress.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    ScreenShots