What are the different components of the Selenium suite?

Selenium as a framework consists of different components, including the Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid.

Let’s look at the components of the Selenium suite in detail.

• Selenium IDE: Developed by Selenium Project, Selenium IDE is a Firefox browser plugin that provides an alternative to automation scripts in other programming languages. Unlike its predecessors, Selenium IDE is a recording tool, not a code generator. Therefore, testers can create test scripts in any language supported by the Selenium WebDriver API.

They can record and playback their actions in the web application. Selenium IDE also generates comprehensive test reports for your recorded tests enabling you to track test results.



• Selenium WebDriver: Selenium WebDriver is a tool to automate the testing of web applications, which communicates with the browser directly. In Selenium WebDriver, a browser-specific browser driver sends commands to a browser and retrieves results. The Selenium WebDriver doesn't require a special server to run tests. Instead, WebDriver starts and controls a browser instance directly.


• Selenium Grid:Selenium Grid is a management and distribution system for WebDriver. It is made up of several nodes that connect with one another to determine, organize, and distribute tests across various environments.

The Selenium Grid's architecture has been redesigned in the latest Selenium 4 releases. The new architecture allows the Grid to run in three modes: standalone, hub, and node, and entirely distributed. Furthermore, the Selenium Grid is mostly used to run tests in parallel across different browsers and operating systems.