jmeter vs selenium

Question

Hi, I want to get into test automation, and the two tools I found during my first web search are Selenium and Jmeter.

Which one do you think is the first to have a look at? Or do I need both tools as they're totally different?

What I would need is the possibility to do Clientside-Certificate-Authentication, filling forms with different Information, and checking result pages.

Answer 1

Apache JMeter is definitely tool for performance testing and load/stress tests. But you can use it also for functional tests as well (in your example: fill form ->check results but with checking if results are as expected - but better don't do functional testing with him)

For functional testing on the other hand there are Selenium and also Canoo web test.

So final answer will be to combine those two. (I was using JMeter for performance tests and canoo web test for functional testing, but I guess that Selenium is much better choice now)

Answer 2

• Use Selenium for your functional tests
• Use JMeter for stress tests, and measure performance

Answer 3

as mentioned in above replies, Selenium is a tool for testing functionality. Usually its described as a tool for automated testing, while on other hand JMeter is a tool used for performance testing.

I would suggest to start off with Selenium, since the most important aspect of any web application is that it's working correctly. Try to create the basic suite of couple of tests, with the most important automated tests that verify some functionality. Once you have the base automated testing knowledge at least, I would move on to JMeter and performance testing.

In my personal experience, performance testing requires much more knowledge about the system being tested than automated testing. Both JMeter and Selenium should not be complex to learn, but for performance testing you need to more about web application tested.

Answer 4

In both cases you can record a session, so you can start your Selenium or JMeter engine, do something in your browser and then stop recording. After that you can use Selenium or JMeter to run the session recorded again.

Selenium tests browser fields and buttons. In Selenium you can fill a input field and click a button, wait for the page load and then inspect the page.

Jmeter could be used for testing user-browser GET and POST communications. In Jmeter you can request an URL and post some parameters like the browser do and then inspect the page response.

PROS and CONS:

Selenium is good if you want to test javascript page functionalities.

Selenium is good if you want to have your test cases written in Java, Javascript, Python or simple html text files. Selenium can format your test cases in many programming languages. JMeter always uses an XML format for store test cases.

JMeter is good if you don't want to deal with browser versions. JMeter works in all browsers. Selenium has a wide list of supported browsers, but will always have browser requirements.

JMeter is good if you want to also record HTTP, SOAP and RESTFul protocols. JMeter can be used for record and test communications between servers. JMeter doesn't need a browser to run, Selenium does.

JMeter can run SQL queries, bash scripts, Java classes, ... from JMeter test. By the other hand, Selenium tests can be embedded in Java, Python, Javascript, ... programs.

Both supports xpath, html inspection, css inspection, ...