Allure report vs Extent report. Which is Better?

In today’s testing world, almost everything is pre-defined and automated to minimize the requirement of humans at different levels. As automation testing helps us significantly reduce the time and effort required to perform the tests, we will be able to test more. But it isn’t just about running automated tests day in and day out. You’ll have to validate if the completed automation tests covered the requirements, if there were any false positives, and so much more. And that’s where the use of effective reporting tools comes into the picture! So in this blog, we will be comparing Allure Report vs Extent Report to help you choose the right one for your testing needs.

We have used both Allure and Extent reports while delivering our automated testing services to our clients and have written this blog based on real-world experience. But before we get started with our Allure Report vs Extent Report Comparison, let’s take a quick look at the importance of Reporting.

The Importance of Reporting

A report is otherwise said to be the evidence for the testing you have done. They also help you analyze the overview of your test run with information such as the test summary, errors, and reason for failure. So by logging & maintaining the reports, you’ll be able to identify the root cause of a bug or an issue when it is found. You will also be able to identify any particular pattern to predict the location of other bugs.

Since most reports will be seen by stakeholders, you’ll have to make sure that your reports can be understood by people who don’t have the technical expertise as well.

Allure Report vs Extent Report: Key Differences

Allure Report vs Extent Report: Full Comparison

A comparison table makes it very easy to get an idea of the core differences between Allure & Extent reports. But you will not be able to understand each point completely. So we will now be elaborating on the points we saw in our Allure Report vs Extent Report table. Let’s start with Allure.

Allure Report:

Allure Report is an automation test reporting tool that can be used to assess or validate the automated test execution.

Feature Rich:

As stated in our table, Allure reports have a lot of handy features that we can use. But on the contrary, Extent report only has a general dashboard and the status & category sections.

Categories & Suites

All the tests will be delivered based on the categories we defined. And the test results will be projected in terms of the Suites we classify.

Timeline feature:

It will record the total time it takes to complete the run. And, it will note the time taken by each scenario as well. So you can compare each and every test’s time frame and get an accurate timeline of how long it takes to run your tests.

Behavior feature:

It groups your tests based on the epic, group, and story you tag your tests with. This will make it extremely easy for you to generate a highly customized report.

JIRA Integration:

If you use JIRA in your project, Allure reports are definitely better than Extent Reports as you can integrate Allure reports with JIRA. Whereas, Extent reports cannot be integrated with JIRA as stated in our Allure report vs Extent report table.

Visual Reports:

The main advantage of using this tool is that the generated reports will be visually appealing with graphical charts. Graphs will help the viewer understand the result in an easily comprehensible way by using Bar Charts or Pie Charts.

So even non-technical people involved in the software development process such as Stakeholders and Business Analysts will understand it with ease.

Though Extent report also makes use of Pie charts, Allure report is far more advanced as we can see in our sample report.

Getting Started with Allure Report

We can add the Allure report to our Maven project by adding the following dependency:

<plugin>
 <groupId>io.qameta.allure</groupId>
 <artifactId>allure-maven</artifactId>
 <version>2.10.0</version>
</plugin>

Important Annotations used in Allure report

@Step – It is used as a step definition to define any modifier with the parameter.

@Epic – It is used to define the large component or a whole product under which Allure depends on.

@Feature – It can be used to represent all the possible test coverages based on the Test scenarios.

@Stories – Every Epic will have many stories and each story represents a sub-product or sub-component.

@Attachment – We will definitely need the screenshots from the test execution in our reports. So we can use this annotation to determine where the screenshot will be placed.

Extent Report

Similar to Allure, Extent report is also an open-source automation test reporting library and can be used with popular automation frameworks such as JUnit, NUnit, Cucumber TestNG, and so on.

Extent Report is good at giving the best report based on the test we run with the preconditions and postconditions we give.

Summarized Reports

Normally, Extent report will summarize the overall automation runs you have made and give you a nice overview of the result. It also gives you information like the number of test cases executed, the passed count, and the failure count.

The passed Scenarios will be seen in Green and the failed scenarios will be seen in Red. So you will be able to quickly filter out the failed tests or passed tests from all the tests based on whatever your need is.

You can also see the categories based on the tags you run the features. You can also see all the reports under the selected category. Additionally, it also gives you the time taken for each test suite as well as individual scenarios to be executed. So, we can even track the estimated time of every run.

So one can say that Extent is on par with Allure in this particular use case.

Easy to View:

If your testing needs require you to have the report in pdf format, Extent Report would be the way to go. As seen in the Allure report vs Extent Report comparison table, Allure reports cannot be generated as pdf files. It is also far easier to view Extent reports as you will not need any command line.

Getting Started with Extent Report:

You can generate the extent report in the path that you specify in the syntax as shown below.

ExtentReports reports = new ExtentReports("Path where you want to store the report", true/false);

ExtentTest test = reports.startTest("Name of the Test you wish to run");

The boolean condition here is used to indicate whether you want to overwrite the existing report or want to create a new one every time it runs.

By default, it will consider this option to be “True” and overwrite the existing report every time the test runs.

Important Keywords used in Extent Report

The use of the ExtentTest is that it will add the test steps and logs that have to be added to the previously generated HTML report. It uses some of the keywords such as startTest, endTest, log, and flush for this purpose.

startTest – When you have to add a precondition before the step

endTest – To add any postconditions before the step

Log – To know the status of the steps

Flush – When you have to delete the existing data in the report and generate a new report.

Allure Report vs Extent Report: Final Verdict

Now that we’ve come to the conclusion of our blog, it’s time to give a final verdict. It is usually never a this or that type of an answer as making a decision is purely dependent on the needs of your project. But with that being said, Allure report would be the better choice for most use cases. That is why we have mentioned the individual advantages of both the Allure and Extent to help you make an educated decision. We hope you enjoyed reading our Allure Report vs Extent Report blog. And if you did, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to never miss out on any of our latest updates.