14 Top Open Source Test Automation Frameworks

Automated testing is one important aspect of making sure your organization’s DevOps pipeline is efficient and spits out quality applications.

Below are 14 of the best open source test automation platforms/frameworks that you can begin integrating with your projects.

Katalon Studio

It dubs itself as an all in one automation framework. Katalon Studio is indeed very popular among developers. It recently released KS7 (Katalon Studio 7).

Katalon Studio has already been known as a web and mobile test automation framework. However, with KS7 its features extend to testing desktop applications. Another cool new feature is the test artifact sharing among different projects.

This and other new features have made an already awesome tool even better.

Selenium

Selenium is an automation testing framework for browsers. It is actually a suite of different tools that can be used independently of each other or in unison.

The tools are the Selenium Webdriver, Selenium IDE and Selenium Grid. Where Selenium shines is it’s easy to integrate with other testing frameworks and is pretty versatile.

Perfecto

Perfecto is a cloud-based web and mobile apps automated testing platform. As it is cloud-based one can perform end-to-end tests remotely anywhere.

Perfecto is best used for enterprise-level applications in the health care, finance and retail industries. One can be sure that testing is done in a reliable and stable environment - making tests accurate. It not only performs testing but also debugging and allows for failures analysis. As it integrates well with other frameworks such as Appium and Selenium, it can easily be included in existing projects.

TestProject

TestProject is a web, mobile and API automated testing framework. It dubs itself as the first one to do it for free. It particularly is for end-to-end testing (or a method of testing the whole workflow of a user using the application).

TestProject has at its backbone the likes of Selenium and Appium (both included in this list) and it allows you to import tests from other projects. TestProject’s community is one of the best in the testing industry.

Appium

Appium is a great testing tool for mobile (both IOS and Android) apps (both native and the web). One can run tests both on an actual mobile device as well as through an emulator.

One key feature is that you can run the same exact test scripts for both IOS and Android (devices and emulators). What’s more is that you don’t need to have many dependencies to install on your device to use it.

Cucumber

Cucumber is a Behavior Driven Development automated testing platform that can be used for Java, Ruby, Groovy and Scala. While not an entirely codeless tool, it allows one to write tests easily even if they’re not the techie type.

It has two major tools. Cucumber Open which validates specs against code that you can run on any stack. Cucumber Studio is a great testing collaboration tool. It also has Cucumber School, which is an awesome learning platform.

Apache Maven

Apache Maven isn’t entirely a testing automation tool. It’s more like a build-automation tool. However, it has some testing plugins and actually has unit testing built-in.

The different plugins like JUnit, PlexusTestCase, maven-verifier, among others extend this testing capability of Maven. Maven is the go-to tool for Java software project management.

Watir

Watir (pronounced actually like water) is a suite of Ruby gems and libraries for automating web apps testing. It is used by big companies such as Facebook, Oracle and Gap.

While it’s written in Ruby, Watir can run automation tests for web applications built on any language. It supports most major web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Apache JMeter

Another member of the Apache tools family, JMeter is a tool used to test performance related aspects of a software such as load tests and regression tests. It is a desktop application powered by Java with a simple and clean graphic user interface.

It creates a simulation of users making requests to a single server and then it analyzes how the server performs and returns the corresponding metrics. Aside from using JMeter for performance testing it can now be used to do unit and functional tests as well.

Espresso

Espresso is an Android testing tool for mobile app user-interfaces. Using its Screen Robots feature one can write tests faster. Screen Robots are small functions that remove repetitions in certain user tasks.

In Espresso tests can be written either in Java or Kotlin - the two major languages used to code Android apps. It has an awesome auto-sync feature which times performing certain UI actions based on certain synchronization conditions. This makes tests more reliable.

TestArchitect

TestArchitect calls itself a keyword-driven codeless automation testing platform. It allows developers and non-coding testers alike to build scalable tests. With TestArchitect you can test web and desktop apps (Windows). It can also perform database testing.

Some of its key features, aside from being codeless, are its awesome analytics reporting, seamless tooling integrations in your CI/CD pipelines, its image based testing and legacy app testing.

Cypress

Cypress is often considered a great alternative to Selenium. It’s a JavaScript based framework for end-to-end testing. As such, installing is as easy as running npm install in your project.

Cypress, in fact, does not use Selenium. It has solved some of the network-centered test run approaches by all Selenium-based frameworks by running tests in the same run-loop as the project itself. Overall Cypress is probably the best end to end testing tool out there.

TestLink

TestLink differs from the other tools in this link in that it is called a Test Management Tool. What it means is that TestLink can help in managing both specifications for the test and the application itself.

Users can easily generate Test Plans - a document where all the particular testing strategies are indicated along with particulars such as schedules, etc. Test Reports are also a breeze to create as it supports exporting them on Excel and Word.

SoapUI

SoapUI is an automated testing tool for RESTful and SOAP (Simple Access Object Protocol) API’s. It has a very easy to use graphical user interface which allows users to quickly write and run functional, unit, regression and load tests.

It also allows for testing security vulnerabilities. Truly it is a breeze to use SOAP UI in making robust and secure APIs.

Conclusion

Testing should be included early on in the software development lifecycle. Based on your particular needs you can be sure that any of the tools above you select will increase your team’s productivity so you can focus on the core activities and remove the tedious aspects of testing.

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