What are the cases to choose Katalon over Selenium?

Question

I know that Katalon technology is built on top of Selenium.

I also know that Groovy has some very powerful features for testing.

But still, is Katalon a little bit underestimated?

In which way should someone choose which one to use?

Answer 1

One of the differences between Katalon and groovy is that groovy is lightweight as compared to Katalon. Since Katalon offers variety of features in a container, it is easier to use. Scripting is very much encapsulated within it. Groovy on other had provides many features for testing - Do check out Spock (http://spockframework.org) which is mainly used for testing Java/Groovy applications.

In a nut shell; which should be chosen really depends on the team composition of programmers, tech stack on which your app is built, maintainability of the application in scope. Hope it helps...

Answer 2

I consider Katalon Studio to be a "best-buy" option (it is free, after all :) - at least for the "foreseeable future".

These are some of the features:

• It is built on top of Selenium, and you can use the Selenium scripts.
• Offers Web testing, API testing, and Mobile testing
• There's also a dashboard style Katalon Analytics (still in beta)
• Katalon Recorder (as an alternative to Selenium IDE)
• BDD and Cucumber support

There's also a growing community of users and a host of other options (JIRA integration, all of the relevant browsers are supported, etc.)

EDIT:

To add a bit of clarification: I don't really consider this as a one or the other problem. I'm still using Selenium even with Katalon.

The same goes for Groovy: it is a programming language used when writing scripts in the "Script" mode of Katalon Studio. (btw. Java code works as well.)

UPDATE: Here's a link showing how to use Selenium in Katalon Studio.

Answer 3

I choose Katalon for the team with some testers some of which can program and some cannot.

Selenium + Java + testNg + RestAssured/RestTemplate + Hamcrest/AssertJ + JdbcTemplete is a good combo I used to use to set up my testing framework. However, it requires much programming skill and not every members in teams can do that.

Katalon is a different story, any normal team can do that. Testers dont event know how to manage driver, set up request or db connection.