"Selenium vs RPA - No comparison"
March 28, 2019
"Selenium vs RPA - No comparison"
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Selenium
We use Selenium in our web development tool and for automation most of the time. Our mains purpose in using Selenium is to automate google forms. We have various sources of input for our events and registrations, but we have to have our all data collectively at one place. So when a user of ours uses our Android app, our website's google forms, or Survey Monkey, we need all of the data on google sheet. We club all data to a CSV and use Selenium to populate google form and sheets, and this way we have all of our data in one place. This complete process gets automated by Selenium.
- First things first, Selenium is open source, thus providing a large community to help out. Most of the times when our team gets struck with some Regex problems or Syntax issues we directly go to the community page and get it done very fast.
- Our Ubuntu based environment makes it favorable to work with Python and Selenium. Our clients, mostly with Windows systems, send us their script and we rectify them on Linux. This makes it a script-based and logic-centric tool. No barrier to the OS or Platform.
- The preloaded libraries for Selenium make it suitable to work fast with repeated business goals. It is very easy to locate Tags, HTML elements, CSS, etc. Our Chrome and Firefox based scripts work seamlessly on all platforms.
- The technology lacks fault tolerance. Whenever we automate a google form with a centralized CSV, there is always a chance of getting a "NaN Error," i.e, no value error. Some of the fill-ups in google forms are always optional and there's no constraint to fill them, which leads to the input being marked as empty or no value. Thus we have to add if-else logics for the same things.
- When we scrape data using Selenium, we always end up with fewer values than expected. Suppose we have a table to import/scrape, Selenium updates the table in the spreadsheet real-time, and open-writes each time rather than making a buffered-table in its memory and updating the spreadsheet at once.
- Scripts written for Internet Explorer always need debugging to work with Firefox and Chrome in an Ubuntu/Linux environment. Though we mostly use chrome in windows to write logic, some of the webpages are IE friendly.
- Firstly, we moved our partial work environment from Linux/Ubuntu to Windows as Tools for automation rolled out in 2016, like RPA Tools. Though you cannot compare RPA with Selenium, our business goals satisfied quite well with RPA tools.
- Secondly, we had our engineers already familiar with Ubuntu and Python until we integrated Selenium. Soon we had to recruit new interns for RPA, and some of our permanent members had to learn RPA.
- Though having a large community, you don't always get lucky enough to have required Regular Expressions (Regex). You always have to brainstorm before initiating the Python script. It is very time-consuming to find proper tags and selectors from a webpage payload.
We use both the products in our work. Mostly we avoid Selenium because we have replaced that half of the work with RPA, which works faster than Selenium and with less brainstorming. Some of our work can only be done with Selenium, while some of our work can work faster with RPA.