What is Robot Framework and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Robot Framework
- Selenium
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. ...
- 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. ...
- Cypress
Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website. ...
- TestNG
It is a testing framework designed to simplify a broad range of testing needs, it covers all categories of tests: unit, functional, end-to-end, integration, etc.Run your tests in arbitrarily big thread pools with various policies available (all methods in their own thread, one thread per test class, etc. ...
- Gauge
Gauge is created by ThoughtWorks. Gauge let you write tests in plain-speak and refactor fearlessly. Gauge’s pluggable architecture allows you to customize your environment so you can write tests in the language and IDE of your choice. ...
- Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is a free and robust automation solution for API, Web and Mobile testing. It integrates all necessary components with built-in keywords and project templates into a complete automation framework. Katalon Studio is easy-to-use for new users but still offers advanced capabilities for experienced users. The solution is trusted by an active community of over 150K users from 150+ countries around the world. ...
- pytest
A framework makes it easy to write small tests, yet scales to support complex functional testing for applications and libraries. It is a mature full-featured Python testing tool. ...
- behave
It is behaviour-driven development, Python style. It uses tests written in a natural language style, backed up by Python code. ...
Robot Framework alternatives & related posts
- Automates browsers177
- Testing154
- Essential tool for running test automation101
- Record-Playback24
- Remote Control24
- Data crawling8
- Supports end to end testing7
- Easy set up6
- Functional testing6
- The Most flexible monitoring system4
- End to End Testing3
- Easy to integrate with build tools3
- Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm2
- Record and playback2
- Compatible with Python2
- Easy to scale2
- Integration Tests2
- Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework0
- Flaky tests8
- Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)4
- Update browser drivers2
related Selenium posts
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.





In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.
Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.
PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.
Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!
Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.
We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).
Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service
- Simple Syntax20
- Simple usage8
- Huge community5
- Nice report3
related Cucumber posts
For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL
With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.
I am a QA heading to a new company where they all generally use Visual Studio Code, my experience is with IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. The language they use is JavaScript and so I will be writing my test framework in javaScript so the devs can more easily write tests without context switching.
My 2 questions: Does VS Code have Cucumber Plugins allowing me to write behave tests? And more importantly, does VS Code have the same refactoring tools that IntelliJ IDEA has? I love that I have easy access to a range of tools that allow me to refactor and simplify my code, making code writing really easy.
Cypress
- Open source29
- Great documentation22
- Simple usage20
- Fast18
- Cross Browser testing10
- Easy us with CI9
- Npm install cypress only5
- Good for beginner automation engineers2
- Cypress is weak at cross-browser testing21
- Switch tabs : Cypress can'nt support14
- No iFrame support12
- No page object support9
- No multiple domain support9
- No file upload support8
- No support for multiple tab control8
- No xPath support8
- No support for Safari7
- Cypress doesn't support native app7
- Re-run failed tests retries not supported yet7
- No support for multiple browser control7
- $20/user/thread for reports5
- Adobe4
- Using a non-standard automation protocol4
- Not freeware4
- No 'WD wire protocol' support3
related Cypress posts
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.
We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.
related TestNG posts
We use JUnit for our Java Unit and Integration tests in Version 5. Combined with @JMockit2 and @truth (from Google) we perform all kinds of tests on our minecraft, standalone and microservice architecture.
We prefer JUnit over TestNG because of the bigger community, better support and the generally more agile development. JUnit integrates nicely with most software, while TestNG support is a little more limited.
Gauge
- Easily extendable1
- Open Source1
related Gauge posts
Katalon Studio
related Katalon Studio posts
I want to do api testing using any one of this tool. I need to run the test scripts whenever new collection has been given. So if i run my test in Postman, i need to add test scripts manually every time i get new collections. Guide me is there any alternate solutions to reuse my test scripts in postman or which one is best either Katalon Studio or postman..
related pytest posts
related behave posts
Hi everyone!
I am starting in test automation. I like Python direction, but in many roles, Cucumber is asked as the skill. So is behave totally replacing Cucumber or it would be better to learn Java and Cucumber?