API vs UI Testing: Which one should you choose? Well, that’s a tricky choice because both these testing types play crucial roles in ensuring the overall functionality and reliability of an application.
Validating the front end and back end is crucial to ensuring the smooth operation of any application type. This blog will discuss the basics of API and UI testing, their differences and advantages, and how they impact an application’s quality.
Table Of Contents
What is API Testing?
API testing is a software testing technique that tests the APIs and the business logic of the application. It helps check if the APIs are working fine as expected in terms of functionality, performance, reliability, and security.
Also, this testing requires software to send calls to the API. The software will send requests to API, receive output, and compare the actual responses with the expected responses. Thus, it helps check if the API is working correctly.
What is UI Testing?
UI testing is the process of testing the design and layout of the application. It involves testing the individual components of the interface, such as button color, input fields, and menus, as well as how they interact with each other.
Testers focus on evaluating the look and feel of the application to identify any design defects, errors, or usability issues before the product is released to end users.
The importance of testing UI cannot be overstated. A recent survey stated that 21% of businesses have low website traffic due to issues with their website performance. Also, a recent Google survey revealed that over 53% of mobile site visitors leave the web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
API vs UI Testing: The Core Differences
Both testing types play a major role in assuring a product’s quality. Let’s take a quick look at the major differences to understand these concepts better.
| UI Testing | API Testing |
| Testers perform it | Developers and testers perform it |
| The functionality of the application is tested | The Business Logic of the application is validated |
| Testing is between the user and front-end of the application | Testing is between back-end of one application and back-end of another application |
| It is performed on the presentation layer, i.e., the front-end | It is performed on the business layer, i.e., the back-end |
| Slow execution time | Fast execution time as no user interface is required for this testing. |
| Both manual and automated testing are possible. | Both manual and automated testing are possible. |
| Manual UI testing is preferred only in the case of small websites that consist of a minimum number of web pages and UI elements. | Though manual API testing is possible, it is highly daunting as you need to process a large amount of data for testing. |
| Automated UI testing is considered the best for fast and efficient results. | Automated API testing offers fast and efficient results. |
| Top test automation tools like Testsigma, Selenium, or Cypress can be used. | Top test automation tools like Testsigma, Apache JMeter, Postman, or SoapUI can be used. |
| Improves your application’s quality and stability as it helps find and fix bugs in the UI. | Improves the overall security of the application as it helps identify security vulnerabilities in the API. |
| Ensures users have a positive experience while using your product. | Tests the product in-depth and validates if all the system components and databases are working as expected. |
| High test maintenance because changes to the UI can be quite frequent | Low test maintenance as changes to the API are mostly rare. |
Though various tools are available in the market, Testsigma is one of a kind that allows you to automate both these tests in one platform.
Automating API and UI Testing With Testsigma
Testsigma is a powerful GenAI-powered test automation platform that lets you automate both UI and API testing in the same place. It is a cloud-based codeless testing platform that allows you to create and execute automated tests for web, mobile, desktop, API, Salesforce, and SAP applications. A quick look at the benefits,
- GenAI-powered testing: Interact with Copilot using prompts. Copilot generates automated test cases and test scenarios within seconds based on user prompts.
- Faster test development: Create your automated tests in seconds using GenAI and codeless testing.
- 70% more test coverage: Cover multiple test scenarios including edge cases, by getting test suggestions from Copilot.
- Zero setup time: No infrastructure setup is required. You can quickly execute your API tests on the cloud.
- 10x Faster: It makes your entire test automation process 10x faster and more efficient.
- Unified testing: Automate your web, mobile, desktop, API, Salesforce, and SAP tests in one place.
- Faster execution time: Run your UI, functional, API, visual, and accessibility tests in the same run.
- 70% reduced test maintenance: AI-powered auto-healing tests can help reduce test failures by adapting to UI changes.
- Test continuously: Integrate automated tests into your existing CI/CD and DevOps pipeline. Testsigma offers 30+ integrations with popular tools to ensure continuous testing.
- Parallel testing: Run multiple tests simultaneously on various test environments on the cloud.
- Read device testing: Use our real device cloud to test across 3000+ real devices/platforms/browsers on the cloud.
- Actionable test insights: Get automated test reports that highlight failures or errors and provide detailed insights into the performance of your application.
API Test Case Generation Using Copilot
With Testsigma, you can automate API testing in minutes using Copilot. How can Copilot enhance your API test automation? Let’s discuss:
- Build API tests and validate responses in real-time
- Improve your test coverage by 3X with data-driven testing
- Validate your API using various REST API methods like GET, POST, DELETE, PUT, and HEAD via one integrated test or separate tests for each method.
- Perform both API and functional UI tests using the same platform.
- Validate API responses using various comparison modes
- Easily send multiple API requests to test whether the communication channels are working properly.
No-Code Test Automation for UI Testing
Testsigma allows you to test the application’s UI without requiring any coding. You can create automated UI tests in plain English using the Testsigma Recorder or NLP Engine. The powerful and intuitive UI makes it easy for technical and non-technical team members to collaborate and deliver quality products in a short time.
- Intelligent test recorder that allows you to create automated tests in minutes.
- Via Testsgima Coilpot – you can generate automated UI tests in minutes based on prompts, user stories, Figma design, or screenshots.
- Easily run automated cross-browser tests on thousands of devices and browsers on the cloud.
- You can also install Testsigma Recorder, the Chrome extension lets you easily record the web interactions and store them as test steps in plain English, which you can directly run on the cloud.
- Automate visual and functional UI tests in the same run with just a few clicks.
Conclusion
It is worth noting that both API and UI tests are equally important and complement each other. Both help ensure that an application is working as expected and that it meets the desired quality standards.
With Testsigma, you can avoid the hassle of installing and setting up multiple tools. Testsigma is an all-in-one test automation platform that allows you to perform both UI and API testing in one place, making it easier to manage and maintain your test suite.
I hope this article helped you understand the differences between API vs UI testing, and now you know which testing needs to be done when. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
