Selenium is an open source tool used for automating web application testing. It has four main parts: Selenium IDE for recording tests in Firefox, Selenium RC for executing tests on multiple browsers, Selenium Grid for parallel testing on multiple systems, and WebDriver which directly interacts with browsers without a server for faster test execution. Selenium supports testing web applications across many programming languages and browsers and allows parallel testing to speed up test runs. However, it only supports web applications and requires programming skills to use.