Capybara vs Selenium

Overview

Selenium

Stacks16.2K

Followers12.6K

Votes527

GitHub Stars33.6K

Forks8.6K

Capybara

Stacks858

Followers191

Votes15

Capybara vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Introduction

In website development and testing, Capybara and Selenium are both widely used tools. While they serve a similar purpose, there are some key differences that set them apart. This article aims to highlight the main differences between Capybara and Selenium.

Architecture: Capybara is built on top of Selenium, extending its functionality and providing a more intuitive and user-friendly interface for developers. It simplifies the process of interacting with web elements and handling asynchronous behavior. On the other hand, Selenium is a standalone tool for web automation. It requires explicit commands and has a steeper learning curve compared to Capybara.
Syntax: Capybara provides a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) that is more readable and expressive. It allows developers to write tests in a human-like language, making it easier to understand and maintain. Selenium, on the other hand, relies on lower-level commands and requires developers to have a deeper understanding of web technologies and programming languages.
Browser Support: Capybara supports multiple browsers out of the box, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others. It provides a consistent interface for interacting with different browsers, abstracting away the details of each specific browser. Selenium, on the other hand, requires browser-specific drivers to be installed and configured separately. It provides more flexibility in terms of browser versions and configurations but requires additional setup.
Parallel Execution: Capybara comes with built-in support for running tests in parallel, allowing for faster test execution and better resource utilization. It provides a simple API for managing parallelism, making it easier to scale test suites. Selenium, on the other hand, does not have direct support for parallel execution. Developers need to rely on third-party libraries or custom solutions to achieve parallelism.
Community and Ecosystem: Selenium has a larger and more mature community compared to Capybara. It has been around for longer and has a wider adoption in the industry. As a result, there are more resources, tutorials, and community support available for Selenium. Capybara, on the other hand, has a smaller but growing community. It is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and ease of use.
Integration with Frameworks: Capybara integrates well with popular testing frameworks like RSpec and Cucumber, making it easier to write and organize tests. It provides additional features and matchers that are specifically designed for these frameworks. Selenium, on the other hand, can be integrated with any testing framework but may require additional configuration and setup.

In summary, Capybara is a higher-level abstraction built on top of Selenium, providing a more intuitive syntax, browser abstraction, parallel execution support, and seamless integration with testing frameworks. Selenium, on the other hand, offers more flexibility, wider browser support, a larger community, and can be integrated with any testing framework.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Selenium, Capybara

Shivam

Mar 5, 2020

Needs advice

we are having one web application developed in Reacts.js. in the application, we have only 4 to 5 pages that we need to test. I am having experience in selenium with java. Please suggets which tool I should use. and why ............................ ............................ .............................

241k views241k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Selenium	Capybara
Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.	Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. WebKit is supported through an external gem.
-	No setup necessary for Rails and Rack application. Works out of the box.;Intuitive API which mimics the language an actual user would use.;Switch the backend your tests run against from fast headless mode to an actual browser with no changes to your tests.;Powerful synchronization features mean you never have to manually wait for asynchronous processes to complete.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 33.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 8.6K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 16.2K	Stacks 858
Followers 12.6K	Followers 191
Votes 527	Votes 15
Pros & Cons
Pros 177 Automates browsers 154 Testing 101 Essential tool for running test automation 24 Record-Playback 24 Remote Control Cons 8 Flaky tests 4 Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui) 2 Update browser drivers	Pros 12 Best acceptance test framework for Ruby on Rails apps 2 Synchronous with Rack::Test 1 Fast with Rack::Test Cons 1 Hard to make reproducible tests when using with browser
Integrations
No integrations available	Rails

What are some alternatives to Selenium, Capybara?

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.

Sauce Labs

Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.

Karma

Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.

Robot Framework

It is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

Playwright

It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.

Rainforest QA

Rainforest gives you the reliability of a QA team and the speed of automation, without the hassle of managing a team or the pain of writing automated tests.

WebdriverIO

WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read.

Cucumber

Cucumber is a tool that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) - a software development process that aims to enhance software quality and reduce maintenance costs.

Related Comparisons

Capybara vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: Capybara is built on top of Selenium, extending its functionality and providing a more intuitive and user-friendly interface for developers. It simplifies the process of interacting with web elements and handling asynchronous behavior. On the other hand, Selenium is a standalone tool for web automation. It requires explicit commands and has a steeper learning curve compared to Capybara.
Syntax: Capybara provides a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) that is more readable and expressive. It allows developers to write tests in a human-like language, making it easier to understand and maintain. Selenium, on the other hand, relies on lower-level commands and requires developers to have a deeper understanding of web technologies and programming languages.
Browser Support: Capybara supports multiple browsers out of the box, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others. It provides a consistent interface for interacting with different browsers, abstracting away the details of each specific browser. Selenium, on the other hand, requires browser-specific drivers to be installed and configured separately. It provides more flexibility in terms of browser versions and configurations but requires additional setup.
Parallel Execution: Capybara comes with built-in support for running tests in parallel, allowing for faster test execution and better resource utilization. It provides a simple API for managing parallelism, making it easier to scale test suites. Selenium, on the other hand, does not have direct support for parallel execution. Developers need to rely on third-party libraries or custom solutions to achieve parallelism.
Community and Ecosystem: Selenium has a larger and more mature community compared to Capybara. It has been around for longer and has a wider adoption in the industry. As a result, there are more resources, tutorials, and community support available for Selenium. Capybara, on the other hand, has a smaller but growing community. It is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and ease of use.
Integration with Frameworks: Capybara integrates well with popular testing frameworks like RSpec and Cucumber, making it easier to write and organize tests. It provides additional features and matchers that are specifically designed for these frameworks. Selenium, on the other hand, can be integrated with any testing framework but may require additional configuration and setup.

Capybara vs Selenium

Overview