Robot Framework vs Selenium WebDriver

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. The real cost is grid infrastructure or a device-cloud subscription.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · since 2008

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

• Non-developers can read and often write the tests, which matters in QA-led organisations.
• Extends far beyond browsers: databases, SSH, serial, network equipment.
• Extremely stable and well-supported in regulated and telecom environments.

• The widest language and browser support of anything in the category, including legacy browser versions.
• A W3C standard, so it will outlive any single vendor. Skills transfer between employers.
• Every device cloud speaks Selenium, which keeps you portable between vendors.

• The keyword abstraction fights you once logic gets complex; you end up writing Python behind the keywords anyway.
• Verbose syntax and whitespace-sensitive files that are awkward to review in a diff.
• Feels dated next to modern JavaScript tooling, and hiring is harder.

• No built-in waiting strategy, reporting, parallelism or assertions — expect to assemble and maintain a framework around it.
• Explicit waits are your problem, and getting them wrong is the number one source of flake in real Selenium suites.
• Out-of-process communication makes it slower than Playwright or Cypress.

QA-led and regulated organisations where readability by non-programmers is a requirement.

Enterprises with polyglot teams, legacy browser requirements, or an existing grid investment.