(SPONSORED ARTICLE) When planning to roll out automation testing with Selenium, there lies a common question which is faced by every Quality Analyst. What’s the question?

“Is it better to set up in-house/on-premises infrastructure for Selenium or should I go for cloud-based platforms that offer Selenium Grid online?”

If you’re stuck under the same dilemma then by the end of this article, you’d have a definitive answer to yourself.

While there can be a number of parameters based on the personal scenarios and specific to the organizations, the following can be considered as generic ones.

Costs

On-premises or Inhouse Selenium grid costs a lot of money in developing, maintenance, acquiring physical devices, engineers’ salaries etc. Not only is the initial investment quite high, but the annual costs are also not small, either. The on-premises infrastructure demands a lot of upgrades and maintenance. On-premises is definitely a dent in your pocket as compared to cloud-based solutions.

With cloud-based Selenium Grid like LambdaTest, you get affordable pricing and ready to fire machines with 24-hour expert technical support to help you overcome any challenge.

Reliable

No one can afford downtime of three days that can delay a new release or an upgrade that rectifies a major bug. A reliable infrastructure ensures that there is no external hindrance from the connected system, infrastructure, hardware, connections etc.

On-premises solutions can be challenging in terms of reliability. Even if you are managing backups (which costs extra), anything can go down at any time affecting the infrastructure and demanding quick attention. Downtimes can also hamper an engineer’s bandwidth which could have been utilized elsewhere in the project.

A reliable cloud-based testing platform like LambdaTest ensures that there are minimal downtimes for maintenance or security purposes. With so many customers accessing their infrastructure, cloud-based systems use best-in-class hardware, a robust system and ensure that even if something fails there is always spare (or backup) hardware of similar strength. LambdaTest has a status page to report any incident that happens on their end to establish full-fledged user transparency.

Scalability

Each organization thinks of scaling its operations to a larger level at some point in time. Scalability requires you to increase your resources and make your infrastructure more complex than ever. You not only scale in operations but also in resources that keep everything up and running.

On-premises solutions are difficult to scale and can lead to complex errors on the way. While scaling our resources we have to invest even more in buying new components and hiring new engineers. Scaling also leads to a bigger downtime if anything fails in between and therefore is a bit hard to manage. Not to forget, every month new devices or browser versions are rolled out by different vendors. To keep your website or webapp top-notch over the latest browsers, operating systems, and devices, scaling your existing infrastructure is inevitable.

Cloud-based platforms for Selenium execution will update their device labs so you could expand your test coverage without any hassle. With LambdaTest, you can start by selecting a basic plan as $15 per month and scale as you grow.

Cleaning & Flakiness

Flakiness is faced by every QA and it’s not a pretty sight. A lot of times flaky test results happen due to inefficient cleaning of machines when you retrigger a system configuration for a new testing scenario. This can become extremely challenging to tackle with on-premises Selenium Grid.

LambdaTest ensures flakiness is kept at bay for good. Every time a session is terminated, the cloud-based machine is cleaned thoroughly so that the results of previous tests don't hamper any future test results. LambdaTest also has a machine learning algorithm-based mapping to map browser and Selenium version for triggering the best possible test execution environment.

Reporting & Debugging

If you’re building an in-house infrastructure for Selenium, then reporting will be an additional overhead for your team’s bandwidth. You need to think about setting up additional APIs or plugins for reporting purposes. However, it juices out the time and bandwidth of your team.

Cloud-based Selenium Grid will provide you with dedicated reports and detailed analytics and logs so you could easily debug your Selenium test cases. With LambdaTest, you can download or share PDF based reports of test execution and can debug from a variety of logs, i.e., video logs, command logs, network logs and more.

Security

Although cloud-based platforms hold compliance certificates such as SOC2, GDPR, CCPA and conduct regular VAPT and security audits. Having an inhouse infrastructure within your own firewall adds an extra sense of security and relief to you and your team.

LambdaTest: Your go-to test automation platform

To summarize, building an in-house or on-premises Selenium Grid is going to be time consuming, costly but has its own edge on security terms. However, that doesn’t mean cloud-based systems aren’t secure. Even Fortune 500 companies rely on cloud-based platforms to ship their test cycles faster.

Pro tip: Whether you decide to go with cloud-based Selenium Grid or on-premises Selenium Grid. LambdaTest can help you with the set up. You can leverage LambdaTest cloud to trigger your Selenium scripts over 30000+ browsers and OS combinations. Or you could leverage LambdaTest cloud and pair it with your own firewall to scale your on-premises infrastructure effortlessly.

About the Author: Harshit Paul is a product marketing manager with a demonstrated history of working as a developer, before joining LambdaTest. A critical thinker who loves to share his thoughts about the latest tech trends, marketing, SaaS as an enthusiast blogger.