Selenium vs PhantomJS

A big variety of websites and internet programs are developed on a daily basis however prior to deploying them to the actual customers it’s very vital to test them by executing against a predefined set of situations or cases, if proceeded manually then it’ll be a completely difficult and time-consuming undertaking so that you could ease the work, many testing software are there in the market. These software program comes with robust features for testing web programs in a brief time frame. Two usually used software programs are Selenium and JMeter so we will examine the features of these two software.

Selenium can be broadly defined as an automation tool used for testing internet applications and programs. It is a free and open-source computer application. The stable version was released in 2021 with advanced functionalities. Selenium is primarily web-based and offers a large number of functions for the automation of internet programs. It’s also smooth to apprehend brand-new users.

Advantages of Selenium

• It is portable and supports different operating systems like Unix, Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc.
• Scripts are written in selenium and support most web browsers.
• It allows integration with third-party plugins.
• It has a parallel test execution feature which reduces test execution time.

Disadvantages of Selenium

• Selenium is unable to run on mobile platforms.
• Selenium written test cases execution needs automation unwrapper.

PhantomJS is an open-source web application testing tool that automates the testing process to a large extent. It was built in 2011 by Ariya Hidayat. After some time it was changed a little bit to inculcate more features and released a stable version in 2016. C, C++, and JavaScript are the core programming languages used in development. It became popular after a number of huge agencies like Twitter and LinkedIn used it as a trying-out software.

Advantages of PhantomJS

• Concurrent test case execution capability helps in saving time.
• It has inbuilt performance measuring tools.
• Screen capture feature is available.
• It consumes only a handful of resources.

Disadvantages of PhantomJS

• It is not compatible with mobile applications.
• Support system is not good.

Following is a table of differences between Selenium and PhantomJS:

	Selenium	PhantomJS
Definition	It can be understood as an open-source automation testing tool.	It is a headless WebKit that uses an API built using JavaScript for testing web applications.
Testing Type	It mainly supports functional testing.	It supports smoke testing.
Supported Languages	It supports many languages like Java, Ruby, HTML, Python, etc.	It mainly supports C, C++, and JavaScript programming languages.
Developer(s)	It was developed by Jason Huggins.	It was developed by Ariya Hidayat.
Scalability	Selenium is easy to scale.	PhantomJS has very little scope for scaling.
Performance Time	The interactions are not that fast as PhantomJS as it comes under browser testing	The interactions are much faster than the real browser because of its headless browser nature.
Customer Support	It provides dedicated support for its customers.	Customer support is weak as compared to Selenium.
Component	It has one component for coding to debug.	It does not have only one component for code to debug.
Interface	It has a simple and user-friendly interface which makes it easy to learn.	Interface is complex and learning is difficult.
Custom Test Cases	Selenium does not allow users to run custom test cases.	It allows developers to write and execute custom test cases.
Documentation	Selenium provides extensive documentation which is simple and easy to understand.	It has a good set of documentation but when compared with Selenium, Selenium heads on higher numbers.
Screen Capture	It does not directly supports screen capture feature.	It supports the feature of screen capture.

Conclusion/Summary

Both the software offers various features to ease testing and both are free to use but on the detailed comparison, we can conclude that selenium is the first choice for users as it has an easy interface and better support but for advanced and custom test cases execution user should go for PhantomJS.