Selenium vs QTP differences and usage-quick reference

This article will describe you about QTP vs Selenium point by point in a easy to understand way. In the field of Software Quality Assurance (QA) automation tools, Selenium and QuickTest Professional (QTP) are often compared for their features, usability usecases and differences. Whether Selenium or QTP is a better automation tool or tool of your choice!!

Both are distinctively unique and good in their functionality and successful tool individually. To have a quick look, below is a tabular comparison of Selenium and QTP on different parameters.

Selenium vs QTP

Parameter	Selenium	QTP
Licensing Cost	It is open source. So, there’s no licensing or renewal cost for this tool. It’s free of cost.	User needs license for QTP which is very costly.
Additional Plug-ins	It supports addition of plug-ins to achieve desired results that are not provided by Selenium Core. Since, selenium is open source, plug-ins are also available free of cost.	It also supports add-ons, but user needs to purchase license for them.
Efforts and Skill	User needs to have good amount of Java skill and more coding effort is required to implement the functions.	It requires less effort to create a script, as it has a very good user friendly script development environment.
Actual End-user Simulation	Selenium performs actions in the background on the browser i.e. user can execute tests with the browser minimized.	QTP executes scripts equivalent to a person performing those steps manually on the application. So, browsers can’t be minimized (user cannot perform any other action on the machine while test is running).
Operating System	Selenium supports more number of OS like Windows, Linux and Macintosh.	QTP supports only Windows.
Application Type	It can be used to test only web based applications.	It can test web-based as well as desktop applications.
Browsers	It supports IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and few more.	It supports only IE and Firefox.
Script Development Language	Scripts can be developed in any of the languages like Java, Ruby, Python, C#, Perl, Groovy and many more.	Scripts can be developed only in VBScript or JavaScript.
Technical Support	Since it is an open source, it has no official tech support.	QTP offers very good technical support via phone, mail, web forum.
Test Development Environment	Test scripts can be developed in various IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio, Netbeans etc.	Test scripts can be developed only in QTP.

Download a quick Selenium-vs-QTP in PDF Format.

Thanks for reading.