Suitable free/open-source automated tests framework(s) (UI / API / mobile)

Question

Context

Again, the 1 million dollar question... I have programming background skills, and about 6 months ago accepted a new role as the main responsible for QA testing at my company's development team. During this time, I've done manual functional tests on web apps, APIs (via Postman) and Android/iOS apps. Now, besides our own myriad of products, we're merging with other companies, which increases both the necessity of automated tests and its complexity. I will be also assigned to this new phase, and starting next month there will be a new team member with some experience on the area that will guide me, but till then I'm on my own. Now I'm doing some research so I can pick some platforms/tools and starting learning them through tutorials (which is the reason for this question)

Technologies

In our company we currently use (but not limited to) these:

• DBs: MySQL, PostgreSQL
• Back-end / API: PHP/Laravel, Node.js / Express / NestJS
• Front-end / UI: Vue, Android, iOS
• CI / CD: GitLab

Requirements

• Free / open-source license
• Regression testing
• Ideally, integrating with all the technologies/tools mentioned above: UI (web / mobile) & API automated testing

What I've found so far

I'm a total rookie on the field, so from a quick research and taking into account everything I've written above, some names like Selenium, Katalon, Cypress, Cucumber, QA Wolf, TestCafe, Appium and Karate come to mind, but I'm kind of lost... any stack of suggestions upfront, so I can focus on learning some these (or other) tools? I believe that only one framework/tool won't suffice, of course...

Answer 1

Given your requirements you can try Serenity/JS. It is an open-source framework built around Webdriver, and over Selenium and Appium, with additional support for adding custom Webdriver implementations. It also provides an extensive set of libraries and nice reporting support. It is well versed to support both UI(web and mobile) and API. Additionally, it has good support and with regular releases and quite detailed documentation to help you started, and good user-base among outsourced software testing.

Answer 2

There are few open-source options available and the most famous one is Selenium, Katalon, Webdriverio, Protractor etc you can use different languages like python, java, javascript, typescript etc but according to your needs I think you should look up for Webdriverio, i just started to explore it and it's a great automation tool until now I have easily written tests for a react & react-native based applications.