Interview question 12: QTP or Selenium?

The one of the recently hired interns, who works in a temporary QA Engineer position with an emphasis on on-the-job training rather than only employment, asked me about the piece of advice in choosing between HP QuickTest Professional and Selenium as carrier path.

Let's take a quick look and compare both test automated tools:

Selenium is free open source test automation tool, while HP QTP price is around a few grand. It means if you want to add Selenium to your skill set, just download application, download manual and start working. QTP download is available only for HP customers, although of course everyone can download free trial version of QuickTest Pro, but it will work only for 30 days and then you will get bombarded by HP sales representatives trying to get your money.

There are no a single QTP book or tutorial published yet, comparing with several recently published Selenium books.

Selenium allows creating automated test scenarios only against web applications. In mean time Quality Assurance Engineer may automate client server application with QuickTest Professional.
Selenium supports a wide range of browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera or Konqueror on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In mean time HP QuickTest Professional is limited to Internet Explorer on Windows.

HP QTP uses a scripting language implemented on top of VBScript to define the test procedure, and to manipulate the objects and controls of the application under test.
Selenium has lots of language bindings like Java, .Net, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, so anyone can learn not only tool, but add a few more lines in the resume.

Last thing to check is go to any job search sites like dice.com or monster.com and compare how many positions are available for QTP or Selenium.

Update
A few HP QTP books have been released recently on market, for detailed review look at Top recommended books for QTP.