Selenium WebDriver vs Reflect

Free and open source

Free tier available

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

Now sold on a credit model — Premium 5,000 credits a month, Advanced 20,000, Enterprise 40,000, all with unlimited users — and SmartBear does not publish the prices, so you need a quote. Credits are consumed by test runs, so concurrency and suite size drive the bill.

Everything, self-hosted

14-day trial.

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

Emerging

SmartBear (formerly Reflect Software) · since 2019

• 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.

• Nothing to install; a non-technical colleague can record a regression test in ten minutes.
• Handles file uploads, iframes and email verification, which trip up many no-code tools.
• Transparent published pricing, which is rare in this segment.

• 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.

• Cloud-only, so testing a private environment requires network work.
• Not suited to very large suites or heavy conditional logic.
• Small vendor — check longevity if this becomes critical infrastructure.

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

Startups that need ten critical journeys covered without owning a framework.