Appium vs Selenium
Appium
appium.io
Selenium
selenium.devSide by side
| Figure | Appium | Selenium |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Testing Automation Software | 8.1 (#9) | 8.5 (#7) |
| Spec score · Testing And Qa | 8.1 (#12) | 8.5 (#8) |
| Spec score · GUI Testing Software | 8.1 (#13) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Spec score · Software Testing Tools | 8.1 (#13) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Spec score · Functional Testing Software | 8.1 (#17) | 8.5 (#11) |
| Spec score · Regression Testing Software | 8.1 (#13) | 8.5 (#11) |
| Spec score · Automated Testing | 8.1 (#16) | 8.4 (#14) |
| Spec score · End-to-End Testing Software | 8.1 (#15) | 8.4 (#12) |
| Languages | The documentation lists official Appium clients for Java, Python, Ruby, and C#, plus other clients such as WebdriverIO for Node.js. | The main project supports client bindings for .NET/C#, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. |
| Purpose | Appium is an open-source project and ecosystem of software for UI automation across mobile, browser, desktop, TV and other platforms. | Selenium is a suite of tools for automating web browsers, primarily for testing web applications. |
| Security | Appium recommends running its server locally or within a protected internal network, avoiding untrusted users and not exposing its ports to the wider internet. | The Grid guide warns that Grid must be protected from external access with appropriate firewall permissions because exposure can allow access to infrastructure, internal apps and files, or custom binary execution. |
Plans
In their own words
Selenium
Selenium is a free suite of tools for automating web browsers, primarily to test web applications. WebDriver provides language bindings for controlling browsers locally or remotely, and is a W3C Recommendation. The main project supports.NET/C#, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. Selenium IDE is a browser add-on for recording and replaying interactions in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. For distributed tests, Selenium Grid spreads work across machines and combinations of browsers and operating systems. Grid offers Standalone, Hub and Node, and Distributed configurations; Docker and Kubernetes deployment resources are also linked. Selenium Manager can discover, download, and cache browser releases and drivers. Documentation covers browser-specific functionality for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, and names GitHub Actions and Jenkins as CI/CD examples. Selenium began in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago. Grid has no authentication by default, and the project advises restricting external access and placing it behind a secure network. The latest Opera driver functionality is not supported, and that driver is officially unsupported. Selenium costs nothing.