Laravel Homestead vs Selenium: What are the differences?
Developers describe Laravel Homestead as "The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box)". Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications. On the other hand, Selenium is detailed as "Web Browser Automation". 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.
Laravel Homestead belongs to "Virtual Machine" category of the tech stack, while Selenium can be primarily classified under "Browser Testing".
"Easy to setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Laravel Homestead over the competitors, whereas "Automates browsers" was stated as the key factor in picking Selenium.
Laravel Homestead and Selenium are both open source tools. It seems that Selenium with 14.9K GitHub stars and 4.97K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Laravel Homestead with 3.14K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Selenium has a broader approval, being mentioned in 776 company stacks & 440 developers stacks; compared to Laravel Homestead, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.