Why Buying A Commercial Selenium Grid Solution Is (Typically) Better Than Building Your Own

Cost

Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, the cost of building and maintaining your own Selenium Grid varies greatly. Below are some examples from our customers of the cost and effort required when building your own solution.

• Building and maintaining your own enterprise grade Grid requires significant resources
• Typical timeframe for building: 9-24 months
• Required staff: senior level software engineers with deep know-how in Selenium, system administrators, project manager, security engineers, network architects
• Time lost in recruiting staff and building the solution: minimum 1 year
• Maintenance and further development: team of developers, system admin and security personnel required
• If mobile testing is in scope, these figures are significantly higher. Appium / Mobile is extremely complex to set up in an enterprise grade fashion especially if you want it to work in a combined Grid for browsers and mobile.

Business Continuity

• A homegrown Grid requires a highly specialized internal team (with backup) for support, maintenance and further development
• In case of restructuring, attrition, or if key people leave the team, the entire test automation infrastructure is jeopardized
• When buying a commercially supported solution like SBOX, there are clear SLAs in place and we also provide 24/7 support

Skills and Talent

Building and maintaining your own Grid requires a team that has in-depth knowledge of Selenium (down to the protocol level) as well as advanced skills in server operations, proxies, firewalls, etc. This is typically hard to find and unite in one team.

Productivity

Building and maintaining test automation infrastructure is (most likely) not your core business. With engineering resources being scarce, organizations should focus on tasks and topics that are their core business and lie within their core competencies. For everything else, they should use commercial solutions (just like everybody busy Microsoft Office rather than building a text editor on their own).

Functionality and Features

The open source Selenium Grid is fundamentally not enterprise ready as there are many key features missing. As well, the architecture does not allow for easily building these features in. The open source Selenium Grid was never meant to be used in enterprises.

Below is a high-level overview of SBOX features in comparison to an open source grid.

Conclusion

A secure, reliable and scalable Selenium Grid cross browser infrastructure is crucial for successful continuous testing and DevOps setup. Setting up and maintaining a mature enterprise grade Selenium Grid infrastructure requires a significant investment and is a complex undertaking. While a homegrown solution can be a good starting point, for most enterprises, they quickly become unmanageable. Homegrown solutions require a big up-front investment in terms of engineering resources, as well as deep Selenium Grid know-how. Maintenance for a homegrown Selenium Grid is time consuming and prone to error due to frequent new release of browsers and the Selenium ecosystem.