What is difference between Assert and Verify in Selenium?

There are differences between Assert and Verify in Selenium. Both of these are used to verify if a webelement is available on the page. If the Assert fails, the test execution shall be stopped.

The moment an Assertion has not passed in a step, the test steps after that step shall be hopped. However, this can be avoided by adding a try-catch block and incorporating the Assertion within this block.

So the flow of the program execution continues if the Assertion yields a true condition. If not, the following steps after the failed step gets bypassed from the execution.

To overcome this issue, there is a concept of Soft Assertion or Verify commands. Here, if there is a failure, the test execution continues and the failure logs are captured. So the flow of the program execution continues no matter if a Verify command yields a true or a false condition.

This type of assertion is added for unimportant scenarios where we can proceed with the test even if the expected result for a step has not matched with the actual results.

Code Implementation with Assert

import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.Annotations.Test;
public class NewTest{
   @Test
   public void f() {
      //Assertion pass scenario
      Assert.assertTrue(2+2 == 4);
      System.out.println("Scenario 1 passed");
      //Assertion fail scenario
      Assert.fail("Scenario 2 failed with Assert");
      System.out.println("Scenario 2 failed");
   }
}

Output

Code Implementation with Verify/SoftAssert

import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.Annotations.Test;
import org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert;
public class NewTest{
   @Test
   public void f() {
      //instance of SoftAssert
      SoftAssert s = new SoftAssert();
      //Assertion failed
      s.fail("Scenario 1 failed with Soft Assert");
      System.out.println("Scenario 1 failed");
      //Assertion failed
      s.fail("Scenario 2 failed with Soft Assert");
      System.out.println("Scenario 2 failed");
      //collects assertion result then mark test as failed/passed
      s.assertAll()ß
   }
}

Output