What is the difference between Selenium Webdriver and Selenium Grid?

Selenium WebDriver drives the browser using browser's built-in support. WebDriver is a tool for testing web applications across different browsers using different programming languagesSelenium grid lets you distribute your tests on multiple machines and all of them at the same time. Hence you can execute test on IE on Windows and Safari on Mac machine using the same test script (well, almost always). This greatly helps in reducing the time of test execution and provides quick feedback to stack holders.

Selenium Webriver : 

• It is a simple framework used to develop test scripts with the help of any programming language which is supported by webdriver.
• Scripts developed by this framework will run only on one specific OS and Browser at a time

Selenium Grid :

• This will work on HUB and NODES. if your requirement is to execute test script on different machines, different Operating Systems and Different browsers, then, selenium Grid is most suitable for this scenario.

Selenium Webdriver is the framework where it is used to automate test scripts where these test scripts can be executed on different browsers.Selenium Grid is part of selenium to run the automated test scripts on different machines and different browsers.

Selenium webdriver is basically a framework,it lets you create test scripts and run the test on different browsers

Selenium Grid is used to run tests in different machines simultaniously .our test should be run indifferent versions of different browsers

SELENIUM WEBDRIVER:

1.    It supports with all browsers like Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera etc.

2.    It doesn’t supports Record and playback

3.    Doesn’t required to start server before executing the test script.

4.    Interacts natively with browser application

5.    It supports of moving mouse cursors.

6.    No need to append full xpath with ‘xpath=\\\\’ syntax

7.    It support to test iphone/Android applications.

SELENIUM GRID:

1.       Selenium-Grid allows you run your tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. That is, running multiple tests at the same time against different machines running different browsers and operating systems. Essentially, Selenium-Grid support distributed test execution. It allows for running your tests in a distributed test execution environment.

Webdriver is an interface which is used to run our test scripts in different browsers using the instance of the browsers. It uses browser's native compatibility for automation.

Selenium Grid allows us to run our test scripts on multiple machine or browsers or environments concurrently using hub and node architecture. Tests will be run from hub and executed on different nodes simultaneously. Grid uses remote webdriver to execute test cases in multiple nodes

Selenium Webdriver is interface, by using we can automate our web application independent of browser and code language in different/same OS and Selenium Grid is used to run your test on different/same browser,same time in different OS environment.

Selenium webdriver and Grid both are components of Selenium suite.

Webdriver Architecture:

         It controls the browser from OS level. All you need are programming language which contains webdriver commands and browser.

         Selenium Webdriver allow us to execute tests across multiple browsers and parallel execution is also possible but on a single machine

Grid Architecture:

Selenium Grid has a Hub and Node Architecture.

Selenium Webdriver allow us to execute tests across multiple browsers and parallel execution is also possible on multiple machine. Please check below detailed info of Hub and Node concepts of grid.

The Hub

The hub is the central point where you load your tests into.There should only be one hub in a grid.The hub is launched only on a single machine.The machine containing the hub is where the tests will be run, but you will see the browser being automated on the node.

The Nodes

Nodes are the Selenium instances that will execute the tests that you loaded on the hub. There can be one or more nodes in a grid. Nodes can be launched on multiple machines with different platforms and browsers. The machines running the nodes need not be the same platform as that of the hub.

Selenium Webdriver is Framework which is used to Automate the Web Application. selenium web driver helps to make to do  functional and UI level Automation testing.

selenium grid is part of Selenium framework which helps to test the web application in mulitple browser, platform and hardware configuration. basically selenium gride is to test the compatibleof the application(compatibletest)

Selenium Webdriver helps to execute test scripts in web applications in one specific browser at a time whereas Selenium Grid helps to execute test scripts in different versions of different browsers in multiple machines simultaneously through hub and nodes.

Selenium WebDriver supports Browser Specific Automation without any involvement of Client Server Architecture. There is no dependency of other browser.

Selenium Grid having a mechanism of Hub and Node where the Developed scripts can be executed on N Number of Clients.

Hub Need to be configured in the Server Machine.

Node setup will be done on each client. Command executed from Hub will trigger the Developed Scripts in Node specific each port used in the Client.