Overview

In this tutorial, let’s learn the differences between QTP and Selenium. QTP stands for Quick Test Professional. It is a proprietary automated testing tool previously owned by the company Mercury Interactive before it was acquired by HP(Hewlett-Packard) in 2006.

Selenium is an API that automates browsers. Selenium Testing Suite is comprised of many components like

• Selenium IDE
• Remote Control
• Webdriver
• Selenium Grid

Selenium IDE is a browser plugin that you can use to record and playback relatively simple test cases and test suites. The plugin supports various browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge browser.

Selenium Remote Control(Selenium 1) allowed users to use programming languages in creating complex tests.

WebDriver allows the test scripts to communicate directly to the web browser, thereby controlling it from the OS level. Selenium RC and WebDriver were merged to form Selenium 2.

Selenium Grid executes parallel and distributed tests across different browsers and operating systems on multiple node machines.

QTP vs Selenium

Selenium has more advantages than QTP in terms of costs and flexibility. Some of the differences between the two testing tools are as follows:

QTP	Selenium
QTP is a commercial testing tool. We need to buy a license to run the tests.	Selenium is open-source and free to use.
QTP has limited plugins. QTP is not an open-source tool.	Selenium is open-source. The tool source code is available. We can extend the tool functionality.
QTP can only run on the Windows platform.	Selenium supports various operating systems like windows, Linux, and MacOS.
QTP allows running tests sequentially.	Selenium allows you to run tests in parallel and in distributed mode using multiple machines.