What are the drawbacks of Selenium WebDriver?

Some of the prominent drawbacks of Selenium are listed below −

• Has assistance for only web oriented applications.

• Time consuming to configure the environment unlike the paid tools like UFT.

• Has no features provided by Test Management tools like ALM or UFT.

• New characteristics introduced in Selenium, sometimes do not work as expected.

• Has no in-built test report generation. It has to be integrated with TestNG/JUnit for reports.

• Cannot be integrated with Test Management tools like ALM or UFT.

• Cannot be used for verifying images.

• Has no record and play feature, hence building a test script needs considerable time and effort.

• Cannot be used for verifying mobile applications. We can use the Appium tool which is based on the WebDriver conventions.

• Tricky to handle web elements which have dynamic attribute values, each time the page is loaded.

• Cannot be used for verifying captcha.

• Tricky to handle issues during page load, proper sync between the application and the tool, and so on.

• Cannot be used for verifying audio and video.

• Cannot be used for verifying fingerprints.

• Requires a fair amount of programming know-how in order to start with test script development.

• Has no direct technical assistance. We have to depend on communities and forums to solve queries.

• Cannot be used for automating web services like REST/SOAP.

• As the framework built on Selenium gradually grows in volume, it is cumbersome to maintain.