Maestro vs Selenium

Maestro is an open-source UI testing framework for mobile and web apps. Tests use human-readable YAML flows, which the local CLI can run on a developer’s own devices or in CI. Maestro Studio is a desktop app for building and running tests, with screen inspection, command suggestions and an embedded emulator. Maestro Cloud runs tests in parallel on hosted devices and provides video playback, detailed logs and flake detection. Supported targets include Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter and web applications. Web testing is in beta and limited to Chromium, with preset locale and screen dimensions. Cloud integrations include GitHub Actions, Bitrise, Bitbucket Pipelines, CircleCI and generic CI providers; test results can go to pull requests, Slack, email or webhooks. Cloud offers a seven-day trial without a credit card. Its monthly price depends on maximum concurrent executions; the Cloud plan is listed at $250 a month per device. Web or Chromium device pricing is available by inquiry.

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.