What is Cucumber?
Cucumber is a testing tool that supports Behavior Driven Development (BDD). It offers a way to write tests that anybody can understand, regardless of their technical knowledge. In BDD, users (business analysts, product owners) first write scenarios or acceptance tests that describe the behavior of the system from the customer’s perspective, for review and sign-off by the product owners before developers write their codes. Cucumber framework uses Ruby programming language.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries aimed at supporting web browser automation. Selenium provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests without the need to learn a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including JavaScript (Node.js), C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala. The tests can then run against most modern web browsers. Selenium runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is open-source software released under the Apache License 2.0.
Cucumber vs Selenium
| BASIS OF COMPARISON | SELENIUM | CUCUMBER |
| Description | It is an automated testing tool. | It is a Behavior Driven Development tool used to develop test cases for the behavior of software’s functionality. |
| Nature | Selenium is also a free or open-source testing tool. | Cucumber is a free or open-source BDD (Behavior Driven Development) tool. |
| Functionality | Selenium is a both Functional and Performance (Selenium Grid) testing tool. | Cucumber is a BDD supported tool. |
| Files | Consists of only one file which contains the script implementation. | Consists of three files – Feature file, Step Definition file (implementation of steps in Feature file) and Test Runner file. |
| Use | Can only be used by users having technical knowledge. | Can be used by users without any technical knowledge. |
| Application | Primarily used for automation testing of front end applications. | Primarily used as a tool for behavior driven development. |
| Languages | Cucumber framework supports many languages, such as Java, Scala, Groovy, etc. beyond Ruby. | Cucumber framework supports many languages, such as Java, Scala, Groovy, etc. beyond Ruby. |
| Reliability | The process of Selenium makes testing more reliable and dependable. | Cucumber testing is less reliable as compared to Selenium and QTP. |
| Installation | Installation is lengthy and complex compared to Cucumber. | Installation is easy. |
| Errors | Syntax errors can be easily determined. | Syntax errors often get unnoticed. |
| Contribution | All the project stakeholders (developers, testers, product owners, business analysts, clients and so on) can contribute. | Team members- developers and testers can only contribute. |
| Condition Statements | Conditional statements can be incorporated. | Conditional statements cannot be incorporated. |
| Role | Enables us to automate steps which are manually performed on the browser. | Enables creating scenarios in plain English with the help of the keywords – Given, Then, When, and so on in the steps. |
| Readability | Less readable compared to Cucumber. | Easily readable. |