The best tool isn’t the most popular one—it’s the one that fits your team and your goals.
Selecting the Right Tool
Before you dive in, pause and check your criteria. Good automation starts with questions: the why matters more than the what. There are some key factors what should be considered, before picking a tool:
- Language Compatibility
- What language is your team strongest in? (Python, Java, JavaScript)
- Example: Selenium works across many; Playwright/Cypress works with JavaScript/TypeScript.
- Community & Documentation
- The bigger the community, the faster you find answers.
- If the documentations are poor, the maintenance can be singificantly more difficult. Bigger teams benefit from tools with versioning, commenting, dashboards, and user management.
- CI/CD Integration
- Can it plug into Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps?
- If there’s no smooth pipeline, it can easily lead to bottlenecks.
- Parallel Execution Support
- Running tests in parallel saves hours.
- Example: Cypress is weaker here, but Playwright handles it without issues.
- Ease of Test Writing & Maintenance
- Good frameworks let you write readable, stable tests.
- Picking the right tool can be crucial for what you want to actually test.
Below you can find the most popular and current selection of tools:
Selenium WebDriver https://www.selenium.dev
- Open source tool, what supports many languages and has great flexibility.
- Pros: Huge community, very reliable and has wide browser support.
- Cons: Not the easiest, slower to set up, brittle tests if not architected well.
Cypress https://www.cypress.io/
- A modern open source tool for web applications, JavaScript-first. Runs in the browser.
- Pros: Great developer experience, fast feedback.
- Cons: Limited multi-tab/multi-browser support, weaker parallelization.
Playwright https://playwright.dev/
- Currently the most popular tool, built by ex-Puppeteer team.
- Pros: Multi-browser, parallel execution, powerful API, speed.
- Cons: Newer, mostly JavaScript/TypeScript (Python/.NET supported, but smaller ecosystem).
Robot Framework https://robotframework.org/
- Open course framework, which is keyword-driven, not code-heavy.
- Pros: Business-readable syntax, great for non-dev testers.
- Cons: Less flexible for complex automation, Python ecosystem required.
JUnit / TestNG / PyTest
- Unit-level + integration automation backbone.
- Pros: Great for API & lower-level tests, flexible, integrates well.
- Cons: Not suited for full UI automation alone.
You can find further and more elaborated information about the testing tools in our previous curriculum, “Software Testing Tools” .
Here’s a summaritazion what can help you decide which tool is the best for your task:
- If your team is dev-heavy, prefer Playwright or Cypress (JavaScript world).
- If your team has mixed skills, or need multi-language + big ecosystem, use Selenium.
- If your team is business-driven, where non-devs write tests, Robot Framework could be a good fit.
- For API-heavy systems, PyTest (Python) or JUnit/TestNG (Java) are more efficient than browser tools.