Intern or Protractor for Angular E2E Testing

Question

Besides being able to leverage Angular locator methods, why would one use the Protractor testing framework instead of the Intern testing framework for Angular end to end testing?

Answer 1

Aside from AngularJS specific locators like by.model, by.repeater, protractor knows when the page is completely loaded, when Angular is settled down and ready - it makes the tests running naturally, there is usually no need in using explicit waits or introducing artificial delays in the testing code. In other words, it always works in sync with Angular:

You no longer need to add waits and sleeps to your test. Protractor can automatically execute the next step in your test the moment the webpage finishes pending tasks, so you don’t have to worry about waiting for your test and webpage to sync.

Besides, protractor has a very convenient and rich API. It's not only wrapping WebdriverJS, but also extending it introducing new features on top. For instance, there are multiple functional programming functions available on an array of web elements, like map() or reduce(). I also like the way it allows to work with "repeaters" through rows and columns. Additionally, there is a nice Plugin API and a set of built-in plugins, like accessibility or timeline.

As a side bonus, there is a protractor-perf package that uses protractor and browser-perf for performance regression testing. You might even use your existing e2e tests as a base for performance tests wrapping the desired testing code blocks into perfRunner.start() and perfRunner.stop().

Answer 2

The big pro for Protractor is that it solve the asynchronicity problem by binding to AngularJS elements to check when the elements have finished loading. It also got an easyer to read syntax (if you come from a ruby background) and a lot more practical tutorial. There is a more detailed comparrison between Intern and Protractor in this blog post here.