Selenium automates browsers. That’s it!

What you do with that power is entirely up to you.

Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.

Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should) also be automated as well.

Selenium WebDriver

If you want to create robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests, scale and distribute scripts across many environments, then you want to use Selenium WebDriver, a collection of language specific bindings to drive a browser – the way it is meant to be driven.

Selenium IDE

If you want to create quick bug reproduction scripts, create scripts to aid in automation-aided exploratory testing, then you want to use Selenium IDE; a Chrome, Firefox and Edge add-on that will do simple record-and-playback of interactions with the browser.

Selenium Grid

If you want to scale by distributing and running tests on several machines and manage multiple environments from a central point, making it easy to run the tests against a vast combination of browsers/OS, then you want to use Selenium Grid.