Alternatives to Robot Framework logo

Alternatives to Robot Framework

Selenium, Cucumber, Cypress, TestNG, and Gauge are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Robot Framework.
306
523
+ 1
120

What is Robot Framework and what are its top alternatives?

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.
Robot Framework is a tool in the Testing Frameworks category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Robot Framework

  • Selenium
    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

    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

    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
    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

    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

    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
    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
    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

Selenium logo

Selenium

15.8K
527
Web Browser Automation
15.8K
527
PROS OF SELENIUM
  • 177
    Automates browsers
  • 154
    Testing
  • 101
    Essential tool for running test automation
  • 24
    Record-Playback
  • 24
    Remote Control
  • 8
    Data crawling
  • 7
    Supports end to end testing
  • 6
    Easy set up
  • 6
    Functional testing
  • 4
    The Most flexible monitoring system
  • 3
    End to End Testing
  • 3
    Easy to integrate with build tools
  • 2
    Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm
  • 2
    Record and playback
  • 2
    Compatible with Python
  • 2
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Integration Tests
  • 0
    Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework
CONS OF SELENIUM
  • 8
    Flaky tests
  • 4
    Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)
  • 2
    Update browser drivers

related Selenium posts

Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 4.1M views

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.

See more
Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 9 upvotes · 891.7K views

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

See more
Cucumber logo

Cucumber

985
36
Simple, human collaboration.
985
36
PROS OF CUCUMBER
  • 20
    Simple Syntax
  • 8
    Simple usage
  • 5
    Huge community
  • 3
    Nice report
CONS OF CUCUMBER
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Cucumber posts

    Benjamin Poon
    QA Manager - Engineering at HBC Digital · | 8 upvotes · 2.3M views

    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.

    See more

    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.

    See more
    Cypress logo

    Cypress

    2.4K
    115
    When testing is easy, developers build better things faster and with confidence.
    2.4K
    115
    PROS OF CYPRESS
    • 29
      Open source
    • 22
      Great documentation
    • 20
      Simple usage
    • 18
      Fast
    • 10
      Cross Browser testing
    • 9
      Easy us with CI
    • 5
      Npm install cypress only
    • 2
      Good for beginner automation engineers
    CONS OF CYPRESS
    • 21
      Cypress is weak at cross-browser testing
    • 14
      Switch tabs : Cypress can'nt support
    • 12
      No iFrame support
    • 9
      No page object support
    • 9
      No multiple domain support
    • 8
      No file upload support
    • 8
      No support for multiple tab control
    • 8
      No xPath support
    • 7
      No support for Safari
    • 7
      Cypress doesn't support native app
    • 7
      Re-run failed tests retries not supported yet
    • 7
      No support for multiple browser control
    • 5
      $20/user/thread for reports
    • 4
      Adobe
    • 4
      Using a non-standard automation protocol
    • 4
      Not freeware
    • 3
      No 'WD wire protocol' support

    related Cypress posts

    Kamil Kowalski
    Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 4.1M views

    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.

    See more
    Robert Zuber

    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.

    See more
    TestNG logo

    TestNG

    474
    0
    A testing framework inspired from JUnit and NUnit
    474
    0
    PROS OF TESTNG
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF TESTNG
        Be the first to leave a con

        related TestNG posts

        Joshua Dean Küpper
        CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 1 upvote · 567.7K views

        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.

        See more
        Gauge logo

        Gauge

        58
        2
        Open source test automation tool that is simple and flexible to use, written in golang and completely hackable.
        58
        2
        PROS OF GAUGE
        • 1
          Easily extendable
        • 1
          Open Source
        CONS OF GAUGE
          Be the first to leave a con

          related Gauge posts

          Katalon Studio logo

          Katalon Studio

          153
          0
          A free and robust API, Web and Mobile test automation solution with continuous integration
          153
          0
          PROS OF KATALON STUDIO
            Be the first to leave a pro
            CONS OF KATALON STUDIO
              Be the first to leave a con

              related Katalon Studio posts

              Shared insights
              on
              Katalon StudioKatalon StudioPostmanPostman

              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..

              See more
              pytest logo

              pytest

              2K
              0
              A full-featured Python testing tool to help you write better programs
              2K
              0
              PROS OF PYTEST
                Be the first to leave a pro
                CONS OF PYTEST
                  Be the first to leave a con

                  related pytest posts

                  behave logo

                  behave

                  65
                  0
                  A Python library to implement BDD tests
                  65
                  0
                  PROS OF BEHAVE
                    Be the first to leave a pro
                    CONS OF BEHAVE
                      Be the first to leave a con

                      related behave posts

                      Shared insights
                      on
                      JavaJavabehavebehaveCucumberCucumberPythonPython

                      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?

                      See more