What is the difference between Selenium Grid and WebDriver?

Question

I am new to Selenium WebDriver. Can you help me figure out the difference between Selenium Grid and WebDriver?

Answer 1

Selenium Grid: is a one of the part of Selenium libraries or we can say Selenium Framework. It is used when you want to execute your tests on remote computer. Say, you wrote your code and you want to execute your test among multiple browsers and different operating systems combinations, you can use Selenium Grid.

You can setup Selenium Grid on the machine where you want your tests to be execute and use RemoteWebDriver class to specify the IP of the remote machine.

Selenium WebDriver is a class that can be part of Selenium Client library that you add it into your project as a dependency. First we had Selenium 1, next we got Selenium 2 (aka, WebDriver) and Selenium 2 onwards we call it as WebDriver.

So, you write your code using Selenium WebDriver library adding it as a dependency to your project and execute the same on your own machine or on the remote machine using the selenium grid.

Answer 2

What Is Selenium Grid?

Selenium Grid has by far been the most useful component of the Selenium project. It allows parallel testing against various browsers & OS combinations through a Client-Server model. Here, the Server is known as the Hub which has multiple Clients to interact with.

With Selenium Grid, you can connect a server to multiple remote machines which can then be used to run a browser automation script over multiple browsers + OS configurations, simultaneously.

 

What Is Selenium WebDriver(Selenium 2.0)?

Selenium WebDriver allowed you to directly interact with the browsers through your automation test scripts. Java, PHP, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Javascript are some of the programming languages it supports. The browsers it supports include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome version 12.0.712.0 and above, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera version 11.5 and above, and HtmlUnit version 2.9 and above. As for operating systems, Selenium WebDriver supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Solaris.

Selenium WebDriver is also known as Selenium 2.