Selenium vs. OATS vs. Opkey: How To Choose Right Oracle Test Automation Solution
Published: 2022-02-23 13:20:26

When deciding which Oracle test automation tool is the best for your frequent update testing challenges, there are a variety of factors to consider: what are the capabilities of each tool? How many enterprise applications can it support? What kind of technical support does each tool offer?

In this blog post, we’ll give a high-level overview of the three most popular Oracle test automation tools on the market: Selenium, OATS, and Opkey. We’ll describe the major pros and cons of each so you have a better understanding of your options.

## Selenium Pros

- Selenium is an obvious choice for Oracle testing as it’s a free & open-source tool with a large community of users.

- Selenium’s strong suit is web GUI testing, and their Selenium automation suite includes tools such as Selenium IDE and Selenium Grid.

- Selenium IDE makes setup easier with record-and-play functionality, while Selenium Grid allows you to perform parallel testing. Taken together, Selenium can be quite effective for these two tasks.

## Selenium Cons

- Selenium is code-based, meaning you need code to set up, implement, and maintain your tests. Simply put, it’s tedious and time consuming to use—especially if you’re running thousands of tests on a quarterly basis.

- Selenium was not built specifically to test Oracle Cloud Apps.
- In technical terms, Selenium uses element properties like ID, Class, XPath, Tag Name, & CSS Selector to identify controls on the screen to perform actions. Oracle Cloud Apps don’t have the same fixed attributes. This means that even the most minor changes in UI can result in flaky & unstable tests. So even though tests are being automated, there remains substantial business continuity risk.

- Selenium doesn’t offer troubleshooting or reporting capabilities, meaning that failed tests are difficult to resolve
- Selenium doesn’t offer white-glove support services if you run into technical problems.

- Selenium only supports browser-based Oracle applications

## Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS) Pros:

- OATS is Oracle’s own test automation tool—it was developed by Oracle and is fully compatible with their applications
- Comes with built-in automation libraries that ease the test setup, implementation, and maintenance processes
- Users can efficiently create load and performance testing scripts, as well as automate their functional & regression testing

## OATS Cons:

- Only supports Oracle’s packaged applications & web-based products
- This means that additional automation tools are needed to ensure complete test coverage

## Tool is costly

This can impact internal budget approvals

## Opkey:

## Unlike Selenium…

- Opkey requires zero coding, allowing you to easily set up, implement, and maintain test scripts for the long run
- Opkey specializes in Oracle applications
- It mines all your existing Oracle test cases, and generates all possible test cases in hours, rather than days
- Opkey’s scripts are self-healing, which alleviates the maintenance burden of testing by automatically incorporating changes across all of your impacted test cases
- This saves hours of man-hours
- Opkey offers advanced reporting and troubleshooting capabilities that are audit-friendly.

- Opkey guarantees Oracle Cloud Certification in just 3 days
- Unlike OATS…
- Opkey supports over 160 enterprise applications, enabling QA teams to perform end-to-end testing across their entire ecosystem of technology
- Opkey’s automated testing achieves more than 90% test coverage, meaning it’s the only tool you’ll need
- Opkey supports all Oracle products—not just web based ones

## Summing Up

As you can see, both Selenium and OATS come with major pros and cons. Though we’re slightly biased, we’re confident that Opkey’s solution is superior to both, as it’s intuitive & efficient to use (unlike Selenium), and allows you to perform true end-to-end testing (unlike OATS). Of course, it also fulfils the most crucial needs for [Oracle test automation](https://www.opkey.com/oracle/), and comes with white-glove reporting and support that most enterprises depend on.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Opkey can help your organization save time and money on Oracle testing, get in touch with us [here](https://www.opkey.com/contact).

And if you still need to do more research, read our blog on “[How To Compare Test Automation Tools For Oracle](https://www.opkey.com/blog/how-to-compare-test-automation-tools-for-oracle/)”