Selenium WebDriver vs TestDriver

Free and open source

From $20 per seat/month (120 testing minutes included, then $0.14/minute)

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

The seat price is the small half of the bill: $20 per seat covers 120 testing minutes, then metering kicks in at $0.14 a minute (about $8.40 an hour). Seats are billed for every GitHub user who gets a PR review or runs a test, and a vision model driving a desktop is slower per test than a headless browser — model the minutes before committing a large suite.

Everything, self-hosted

Free trial rather than a standing free tier; paid seats include 120 testing minutes a month.

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

Niche

TestDriver

• 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.

• Tests surfaces nothing else reaches — browser extensions, packaged desktop apps, canvas and third-party OAuth screens.
• No selectors to maintain, so a refactor that renames every class breaks nothing.
• Runs per pull request in a disposable sandbox rather than against a shared staging environment.

• 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.

• A vision model is non-deterministic. Reruns of an unchanged test do not always take the same path, which makes a genuine failure harder to distinguish from a bad frame.
• Billed by testing hours, and driving a real desktop is slow — a suite that costs pennies on Playwright can cost real money here.
• Young product with a small community; expect to be an early reporter of your own bugs.

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

Teams testing extensions, desktop apps or canvas-heavy UIs, where selector-based runners simply cannot see the thing under test.