Let’s just go ahead and observe some real points about selenium, then we will sit down and think thoroughly about the answer for this question.
At first, is automation really required for performing so called testing validations? I don’t really think so, as every validation can be accomplished by a manual effort evidently. As we say, humans tend to commit mistakes when they are given same tasks every day. This may be true to some extent, reducing the time, man power and improving the efficiency and accuracy, and test coverage are few of the benefits of the automation as we observe in real.
With the above stated and other(which literally can be found on Google) advantages of automation, we can convince ourselves that we need automation to put in place for our project right away but just hold on, there is so much pre-requisite drama required to make that happens.
The pre-requisite starts with identifying the automation tool for the test cases to be automated in our project. There comes a few in mind sparingly, those are HP UFT, and Selenium. Which one should we get along? Various differences do exist between them comparatively such as in cost, browser compatibility, and language compatibility, support, CI, and Execution Efficiency.
Many people say UFT is preferred over Selenium because of its extensive features like record-play back execution, no need of programming knowledge as code(in VB Script) will automatically be generated with recording, Good object repositories, prominent object spying, most importantly the support that we get for the UFT problems/issues/configurations as it is a licensed automation tool.
And the real fact is the above preference seems to be a wrong choice over the period due the cost promising scripts which can perfectly be scripted in Selenium with zero charges as it is an open source tool and it can be integrated with all the possible integrations that are available in the Automation framework. It has become such a powerful tool that every organization/ company has made a mandate that all automation scripts should be scripted in Selenium if they are yet to be automated, and should be converted to selenium scripts if they were supported by UFT before.
I wouldn’t really say that the UFT has completely lost its presence but would emphasize that Selenium has taken over the most. So the selenium learning is, as worth as it is free.