Appium vs Selenium: What are the Main Differences

June 7, 2021 Sahil

There are two dominant mobile automation frameworks to choose from Appium and Selenium. Both have their pros and cons. But which is the right choice for your project? We’ll break it down for you, comparing each framework feature by feature, so you can make the most informed choice possible.

Introduction to Appium

Appium is a mobile automation testing for native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS and Android. It is developed by Sauce Labs, an automation testing platform.

Main Components Appium:

Appium Server
Appium Clients
Appium SDKs.

Appium can be specialized as either a mobile application server or as a mobile front-end framework, i.e. the lowest viable technology for automating mobile applications. When used for automating applications on mobile, Appium sits between the developer’s mobile application and a user’s device (e.g. a smartphone).

Appium implements server-side JavaScript for testing native applications that require server-enabled features. There are many apps on the App Store and Google Play that require this Appium feature, as teams have been automating basic websites and mobile websites as well as basic apps.

As it is a low-level framework all components are added to an existing mobile application, it can be difficult to add new features. Into the above problem, Appium offers an automated prototype server called Appium Prototype Server, where you can run new features and develop new functionality with no backend whatsoever, making it an excellent integration point. Developers can use Appium to add their own serviceability tests or run ad-hoc testing using the in-app Selenium testing tools.

In terms of security, Appium provides enterprise-grade encryption called Secure SSL. This encryption provides the best security level allowing users to access the real application and not be tracked by advertising networks while delivering a high-security score for app stores.

On the other hand, Appium doesn’t provide as many integration features as Selenium, as it does not support the above automation features and the client-server architecture. For integration, you will have to use the Selenium command-line tool directly. It is missing many of the key features of Appium like steps, log files, and file watchers.

Appium has recently gained support for 3rd party manifests, which will allow developers to easily publish Android, iOS, and Windows Phone stylesheets. This greatly speeds up development by letting you leverage the same tool to run on multiple platforms.

Appium supports project dependencies. This means that if you clone the repo, you can automate the tests in separate folders without manually copying files around. This process is also known as global automation.

One major pitfall in using Appium is that you have to set yourself as the active account. This is done via the Appium Configurator GUI. Before you go live though, you should rain-check and double-check that your Appium account is still active.

If you wish to learn more about Appium advanced insights, check out Mindmajix’s Appium Training.

Introduction to Selenium

Selenium is developed primarily for any kind of web application developed in the market, it has no impediment to what know-how the online utility follows within the case of automated testing. It may also help any frequent or fashionable browser-accessible in the marketplace, in addition to working programs corresponding to Windows, Linux, or MACOS.

Components of Selenium:

Selenium IDE
Selenium RC
Selenium WebDriver

Selenium is a suite of software tools for testing web applications. It is a browser automation tool and can be used by automated testing frameworks to execute test cases in multiple browser types and on multiple platforms.

How to integrate both Appium and Selenium into your automation workflow, along with some best practices to follow.

Many developers are new to Appium, while others have been using it for years. Starting with Appium 1.8 and above, support for mobile APIs has been added and we also have SDK and code samples to begin a new automation project.

Whereas starting with Selenium WebDriver 2.0 you can use existing browser automation scripts to start your automation and extend the automation using any number of extensions — meaning you don’t need to rewrite your existing desktop-to-mobile scenario!

Appium vs Selenium: What’s the difference?

The difference between Appium and Selenium is one of technology and one of intent.

No.	Appium	Selenium
1	Appium is open-source and uses the Apache 2 license.	Selenium is also open-source software released under the Apache License 2.0.
2	Released in 2011	Released in 2004
3	Appium is a software tool for automating mobile apps. It uses a JSON-based language to describe test cases, then it executes those tests in an app on a real device or in a simulator.	Selenium is a protocol for automating user and search interactions in a variety of ways. It can serve as a replacement for feature checking tools like Robot Method or by itself as assistive technology.
4	Appium is a mobile test automation tool that allows you to run tests on native, hybrid, and mobile web apps.	Selenium is a web application testing software that can be used to test the functionalities of web applications.
5	It supports multiple programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, C#, PHP, etc.	Selenium supports mobile apps on Android and iOS while Appium supports Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian
6	Categories: Automated Testing Mobile App Development	Categories: Functional Testing Load Testing
7	Appium is designed mainly as an HTTP server because it will support any type of mobile application, so an HTTP server is required for it. But mainly it monitors or develops the same in the JS node, it does not use normal Java or JS code.	Selenium is primarily intended to maintain the automation logic specifically of a web application or website. It was basically designed to be able to automatically communicate with the application using automatic browser actions.

Final thoughts on Appium and Selenium

Appium and Selenium are both great tools that can help you automate the process of testing a mobile app. Appium is a better fit for apps that use more native elements. Selenium is suited for apps that use web-based elements. If you want to test a web-based app, use Selenium. Before using either one of these tools, you’ll want to set up your environment.

Both Appium vs Selenium applications support almost all programming languages, including Java, PHP, C #, the developer is very easy to use in any language where it is needed.

Both Appium and Selenium applications require the correct result of automation testing, it automatically becomes a very cool tester, especially if any human error in manual integration testing is avoided.