Which has better career opportunities, Selenium WebDriver or QTP?

Selenium or QTP? I come across this question every single time I face automation newbie. Before jumping into any solution, I would ask you to go through the following features of both automation tools :

QTP:

• It is licensed tool. You have to pay to use it.
• It supports both Web and Desktop automation.
• It doesn't require much coding skills.
• It supports VB script only as automation language.
• It only supports Windows platform.
• It supports limited browsers and their versions.
• You can’t integrate other automation tools with it like Sikuli, AutoIT etc.

Selenium (WebDriver):

• Selenium is free of cost.
• Selenium only supports Web automation.
• Selenium requires coding skills.
• Selenium supports many languages like Java, Python, PHP, C#, Ruby, Perl etc.
• Selenium supports all platforms, Windows, Linux, Mac.
• Selenium supports almost every browser like Chrome, FF, Safari, Opera, IE and their versions.
• It gives the flexibility to integrate Java or Python modules, other automation tools like Sikuli, AutoIT for your automation needs.

Selenium as Career option:

Now answer to your question, due to a number of limitations and heavy license cost QTP falls behind Selenium and less number of tech companies are using QTP.

On the other hand Selenium is the talk of town nowadays and also the future is bright reason being almost every company is using Selenium due it’s robust and flexible nature. Huge open source community is behind Selenium and they are updating and upgrading Selenium time to time. If you do googling then you would come to know Selenium conferences are going on in all parts of the world whole of the year. Now Selenium 4 is about to launch with brand new features.

Do a simple activity, search on any job portal with two keywords “qtp jobs” and “selenium jobs”. You will find the answer yourself.

Keep reading for extra bonus on Selenium WebDriver.

My view about Selenium vs QTP

Being an automation professional, I would like to go with Selenium WebDriver over QTP. Reason being the large ope source community behind selenium. We are getting regular updates and upgrades in selenium. Almost every company is using Selenium these days. So job opportunities are a lot higher than QTP. While using selenium I felt the flexibility it has, I can do whatever I want to with this tool. Let me highlight few such things:

• Developed an automation framework for Map based web application by integrating Sikuli with Selenium WebDriver using Java. Sikuli is the tool used for image matching and an image based automation tool.
• Developed automation framework and integrated WinIT with Selenium Webdriver. WinIT is used to perform actions on window dialogues. WinIT can be used for Window based application testing.
• By using Selenium WebDriver with Python, performed Performance testing for some of the key features of a Web software.
• Integrated Python’s Paramiko module with Selenium WebDriver (Python) to automate Frontend and backend AIX/Linux console based application. Selenium handled the frontend part and Paramiko was used for backend automation (to run aix/linux commands on backend console)

If you want to learn Selenium WebDriver yourself, you can find a study plan here: How to learn Selenium WebDriver on yourself online

Feel free to ask queries or share your thoughts in comments or email me. Happy Learning! :)