Telerik Free Testing Framework vs Selenium [closed]

Full disclosure: I'm the Evangelist for Telerik's Test Studio and Testing Framework, so I've got some biases here.

WebDriver's awesome. I still do lots of workshops and talks around it. Telerik's Testing Framework (free, with a paid support option) has a great story around cross-browser compatibility, implicit and explicit waits, and a few other areas too. It's also a natural progression from that to the full commercial version of Test Studio -- however, you expressly do NOT have to go to the paid tooling if you don't want to.

Either tool will get the job done. The more important aspects of your long-term success with test automation are how you go about the work. Focus on using the Page Object Pattern well (regardless of which framework you use), and learn how to deal with synchronization around dynamic content (AJAX, e.g.). Get those two concepts nailed and you'll be a lot happier whether you're using WebDriver or Telerik's Testing Framework.

I would go with Selenium. I say this for one main thing: open source.

I cannot begin to explain in words, how annoying it was to be calling something from Selenium and it was doing something I wasn't expecting or I'd pass in a value and it wasn't doing anything. Documentation can be a little patchy, so whats next? Look at the source code.

I've learnt how Selenium works back to front by looking at the source code. With Telerik's, you obviously cannot do this.

With browser support, they are the same.

Both are well written, well maintained, Telerik's has dedicated support whereas with Selenium you are stuck to Google groups, Google and Stackoverflow.

I think I would go with Selenium. I don't know Telerik but I do know that:

As of early 2012, Simon Stewart of Google (inventor of WebDriver) and David Burns of Mozilla are negotiating with the W3C to make WebDriver an internet standard. As such, Selenium-Webdriver (Selenium 2.0) aims to be the reference implementation of the WebDriver standard in various programming languages. Currently Selenium-WebDriver is fully implemented and supported in Python, Ruby, Java, and C#.

Of course nobody knows if it will become a standard but the fact that is under consideration gives me hope that what I learn using it will be useful in the future. Anyway, it's an aspect worth keeping an eye on.

Also, I could do what I needed by reading their documentation.