Ranorex Studio Reviews

Ranorex Spy is the most valuable feature for us, as it provides functionalities for analysis of host or web applications, as well as information for test automation.

We are using Robot Framework for test automation. We have our own Python library that uses the Ranorex API.

I've used it for seven months.

We didn't have any issues with deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

It's scaled just fine for us.

I haven't had to use technical support yet.

This is the only product I've used in my current role.

The initial setup was completely straightforward.

It is reliable and fast. I've had no problems in the seven months I have used it.

Cross browser testing and the ability to perform mobile test automation. Due to this, you do not need to buy two different solutions for mobile and web channels separately.

Our core banking application is developed as a plugin of Chrome. Most of the automation tools do not work properly on Chrome, but Ranorex provides this with less maintenance costs. Also, the automation platform is useful for us.

I encountered a problem during div element recognition. This point could be enhanced.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10

9/10

I had experience on QTP and RFT. They do not support the latest version of browsers or mobile environments. Their costs are high, accordingly.

It was simple.

We implemented it in-house.

It is simple and stable solution.

Features that I have been using actively and bring the most value to me are:

• Ranorex API – using different functions that the API provides to manipulate with the elements on the web page
• Ranorex Spy – identifying the different elements on the web page and generating the element repository to be used in different tests
• Ranorex Reporting – generating the report that shows the overall result of test execution, together with as much detailed as possible result of each step in a test case

Firstly, I can say that Ranorex offers easy-to-use test automation software for developing and managing projects which enables more efficiency with implementing new test cases.

Also, the results of test execution are represented with more details and in a very concise and effective manner. Log failures, successes, info, warnings, screen captures, etc. are possible to use to make the reporting more representable.

I would definitely say that the existing documentation of their API has a lot of room for improvement. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which of the existing functions to use since the explanation of the existing functions is extremely short. So it is left for the user of the solution to try out different possibilities to make sure that the chosen function will fulfill the needs.

I have been using the product actively in my work about a year and a half.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues with scalability because the tool itself gives enough flexibility to work with. For example, if some new features are added to the existing system being tested, it is feasible and easy to add new elements to the already existing repository without any complexities. We can then use existing functions of the Ranorex API to manipulate the elements.

I would rate it positively since their feedback comes a very short time after the requested help, support, or answer via email or their forum.

I would rate it positively since their feedback comes in a very short time after the requested help, support, or answer via email or their forum.

From the beginning of the project, Ranorex was used as solution for test automation.

I wasn't involved in the beginning of the project.

The solution was implemented as an in-house one. There wasn't need to hire the vendor team since the project by itself is not that big or complex.

Since it is possible to reference the API from some other tools and solutions, instead of being forced to use Ranorex studio, we gained a lot on flexibility and re-using our existing tools and technologies in combination with Ranorex features which are relevant for our test automation process.

Compared to the benefits that the product brings, I would say that the prices are reasonable and justified. I think the great advantage this tool offers is that it supports multi-technologies so that it is possible to cover the test automation of variety of different applications and systems.

My rating is based on the features I use. There are some other features of the product that I haven't touched yet because of the way the test automation is organized on the project I have been working on.

I would suggest using this product because even though it is not an open source solution, the benefits of using it are achieved based on the products price. I was a beginner when I started using this tool and got used to the tool in a very short amount of time so I started working actively very quickly.

It depends on the way the tool is used on the project, but either way, I personally think that the period the user needs to get used to the tool is very low because of the support that is offered through user guides and Ranorex forum or customer service.

Spy for X-path and data binding help us to loop or iterate some functions for any module an N-number of times.

It's improved our company in a numbers of ways, but most importantly it helps us save time and the report preparation is nice and easy.

I've used it for two years and three months.

With the new version of Chrome, some objects are identified differently, so we need to identify those and fix the x-path of the object.

It's very good as I have interacted a lot with a number of people (especially Bassem and Bernhard) when faced with the object identification, and they were able to help me.

8/10

We switched because the older solution did not support Chrome.

It was simple.

We can invest depending on the requirements of the business. Run-time licenses can be used if you don't need to develop scripts, floating-type license, or node-lock license.

It's got very good support for automating desktop and mobile applications. 

Built in Object Spy and Ranorex Studio IDE. 

Also, Ranorex Runner where the test results can be customized and saved as HTML is good. 

It's also easy to update the object properties with the help of Object Spy. 

Object Repositories is a top notch feature which allows you to define variables for identifying objects and the value can be set through the code or during run time.

• Quick development of automation framework
• Easy to maintain
• No need of external or third party test runners as Ranorex Test Runner is very good.

Better IntelliSense support while handling Ranorex Libraries and .net libraries.

No issues encountered,

No real issues, but I had to force close Ranorex Studio a couple of times, as it was stuck with the 'Not Responding' message for a long time on Windows 7.

We contacted Customer service only for license-related queries. It was good.

We contacted customer service only for license-related queries. It was good.

Yes, but Ranorex provides good support for all kinds of solutions like desktop, web applications or mobile Applications. It was an all in one package for us.

It was straightforward with no complexity in setting up. The documentation is crisp and clear.

In-House. It's pretty easy to implement Ranorex. The documentation itself was sufficient.

Clients were pretty happy with the ROI, as the pricing was lower compared to other tools and test maintainability was easy.

Dynamically changing application or a desktop application which is challenging to automate, blindly go for Ranorex.

It allows us to replay user actions for desktop applications.

Unfortunately, we were not able to drive this project to completion due to incompatibility between our offerings and product functionality, as well as internal politics.

Running the tool in a distributed environment was a challenge since Ranorex requires an active user session.

I've been using it for one year.

No issues with deployment.

As stated above, we had compatibility issues.

Excellent – very quick and detailed responses.

Excellent – very quick and detailed responses.

Ranorex was able to read some of our custom components, while other tools failed to do that. Also, it was within our budget.

Very easy – desktop application installation. It's almost one click, and only takes five minutes.

We did it in-house.

Pricing is fair.

Check if all your components are recognized by Ranorex prior to buying.

• Very reliable (multiplatform and technologies) element recognition
• Reliable recording
• Speedy and helpful support
• Great community forum.

Ranorex helps us to test our apps more effectively on a daily basis.

The current version of Ranorex Studio IDE is based on an old version of SharpDevelop IDE (3.2), but this is going to change soon (planned update to SharpDevelop 4.x). So aside some minor feature requests I made in the past (many of them have already been implemented), I don’t have any urgent requests. The good thing about Ranorex is that it’s fully .Net compatible, so a lot of things could be self-implemented via custom C#/ VB.NET code.

I’ve been using it personally for over three years, but in Descartes we have been using it for about a year or so.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Ranorex support is speedy, reliable and very friendly.

Setup is easy, anyone with an elementary knowledge of programming should be able to work with it right away. Otherwise, there is comprehensive user guide, some nice video tutorials, and an excellent community forum.

We implemented it in-house as the setup is easy and straightforward. It just requires some time to create and implement a good test automation workflow, however, this is irrelevant to the test automation product itself.

ROI is hard to estimate and I’m not the one who estimated it.

The Ranorex pricing and licensing seems to be adequate, considering the feature set, level of support and frequency of updates. It’s not cheap, but definitely not the most expensive test automation tool.

Before we picked Ranorex, we did a direct comparison with Squish and TestComplete.

I would suggest you try to implement a use case with multiple concurrent test automation products, to find the right one for your needs. It’s good to compare various aspects of different products - element recognition consistency, recording reliability, reusability of test modules, comprehensiveness of support and documentation, and the quality of the community forum etc.

• It offers many features of recognizing UI widgets, making test automation easy. 
• The spy feature is useful in updating the control address of modified UI widgets.

It's reduced the manual effort in verifying the user interface of the product under test.

There were some issues when the UI widget being tested was not developed in .NET, and the test resulted in some unknown actions when played back.

I used it for a period of two months.

Stability was an issue.

I did not get to interact with the customer service.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward.

We used an in-house team.

I believe ROI is pretty high, although I am not involved with the management of the product.

No other options were evaluated.

My advice is to spend some time reading the user guide and interacting with teammates who have already used the tool so that things become straightforward when you use it. It is a good tool to perform user interface testing over a .NET product.

• The ease of use of the object repository.
• How quickly you can get up and running using a powerful programming language.
• Powerful IDE and Visual Studio integration.
• Pricing, particularly the runner license.

Six years ago, the only real alternative was QTP. Having previously used other tools, including Rational Robot, Winrunner, TestComplete and others over the years, we wished to move away from the typical VB scripted approach. Selenium was in its infancy and still a basic tool. QTP, whilst still good, was struggling to keep up with new technologies, despite still being a market leader. For us QTP’s antiquated IDE was no longer adequate and VBscript did not offer the power of newer programming languages.

Ranorex at the time was the only solution able to easily handle the new Ajax web implementations of the day. Our company had just moved to ExtJS 2 and QTP did not provide support for that technology. HP support was not able to rectify the issue whereas Ranorex worked out of the box.

Ranorex support was great also. Support responses were always quick and they were able to work with us to find solutions, weather they were solutions out of the box, or construct solutions for us if they weren't yet available.

For people starting out in automation or even people who have been doing it for years, Ranorex provides an automation solution that can get you up and running with limited fuss. Whilst we no longer use the solution in the way they would intend i.e. we’ve abstracted all of their functions within wrapper classes and simply use Ranorex for interacting with the application, I still believe it is a great tool that caters for a wide range of technologies for testers that are new to automation.

I've used it for six years.

I’ve always been impressed with how easy it is to install and maintain. It’s a quick installation and you’re on your way. These days they have inbuilt test management which previously was not available. As such we wrote our own test management tools and framework so I can’t comment on that side of the application as I’ve never used it.

I’ve always found their support second to none. Responses to my questions were answered promptly and their technical staff are exactly that, extremely technical which is refreshing given the generally basic support previously experienced from other vendors.

Over the last 18 years I’ve used many products ranging from Rational Robot, Winrunner, Test Complete and QTP to now using Ranorex and lately Selenium. I’ve also “played around” with other tools such as WATIR, RFT, SilkTest and lately cucumber etc but I ultimately chose Ranorex because of its price point, hence ROI. It was a fraction of the cost of other commercial tools, yet had the features we needed and was quick to get up and running.

It had a “modern” IDE that was user friendly, I could develop in Visual Studio and it was in a powerful language that most of my team was familiar with.

Our company has recently made a decision to use Selenium also. This was purely based on its cost however. Whilst Selenium these days has become a powerful automation alternative, it is still really limited to people with previous automation experience and with a strong programming background if you wish to achieve similar ROI compared with the commercial tools. For us this is now the case, hence the move.

Selenium however lacks the inbuilt IDE and tools that the commercial solutions have and is still essentially a group of libraries. It does have a strong user base however, hence lots of examples are available in Java. If you don’t have a programming background it can be time consuming to come to grips with however. Selenium really requires a framework to utilise it efficiently, so if you don’t already have one you’ll either have to learn and use an existing framework or build one which will be time consuming. You also need to hook into other tools such as TestNG or similar to get consistent reporting approach (these days UI testing is but a small part of a bigger picture; Unit, Web Service, UI testing etc). As such the tool which started off sounding good because it was free is now incurring significant cost as a result of the lack of inbuilt tools to get you up and running quickly, and the skills learning curve.

I think skilled users loose sight of how much they’ve learned over the years, so whilst Selenium is great and easy to pick up if you’ve already got a strong development background, it’s not a good choice for teams that lack those skills. The commercial tools allow users to walk before they can run so to speak.

Ranorex still has the best pricing point for bang for buck I believe with the runner license availability being a big selling point. When we shifted from QTP to Ranorex six years ago we did so because we were able to purchase 39 Ranorex licenses with the budget we had for the maintenance of our four QTP licenses, and the tool worked on our technologies whereas QTP didn’t anymore. It was a simple decision to move.

The initial setup was straightforward. Just install it and you’re off and running. The software installation was also quick compared to other products. Admittedly we had an inbuilt framework that we’d built available to us so we just wired Ranorex into that framework.

We implemented using an internal team. One thing I would say is that if you have the choice I would always get your automation completed by a professional team rather than manual testers looking to become automated testers. Whilst the costs may seem higher initially I’ve yet to see a manual team introduce robust, maintainable automation anywhere near the timescales that a professional team can achieve. Automation is an art.

ROI isn’t just limited to pricing/licensing. Whilst it is an initial selling point, resource availability, skill requirements etc is what I see as the fundamental cost savers toward your ROI.

Maintenance is a cost killer in automation, so if you haven’t implemented a modular, data driven framework (which requires a skilled team) then I still believe the commercial tools will provide you with a better ROI. As I’ve said above however, if you do have a choice, hire a skilled team as then you will be able to get away with using free tools such as Selenium. The resource will have experience with those products, hence will also be able to implement a maintenance efficient framework in a cost effective manner.

Skilled resources! I can’t push that point enough. You need at least one highly skilled resource to be responsible for the architecture of your framework as long term maintenance will be your largest cost, followed by actual implementation time.

A skilled resource can then help to transfer their knowledge across to less technical resources. Ultimately a good architect will aim to abstract the technical as much as possible to enable non-technical team members to also assist with the automation process. People ofter refer to this as a “script less” approach. Whilst this is nothing new, there is still a lot of contention around this topic, particularly from automation “guru’s” as generally speaking most framework still required a lot of coding, and “scriptless” frameworks simply don’t provide the flexibility of their coded counterparts.

I do believe however that it will become the way of the future and is achievable by continuous abstraction of functionality within your frameworks to eventually get to a point where hardly any code is required to “build your script”. Essentially only data is required to run your automated scenario. Not just data driven in a sense of providing your input/expected result data, but data driven at the object/automation artefact level. Also the more that you can automate the process of producing that data, the better. It is similar to the modularisation of code, only you’re not modularising data.

This is something we’ve achieved for our company. I refer to it as “Model Based Automation” as we use a model hierarchy for managing all of our application objects. A data dictionary as such. This model can be built manually, or automatically scraped from an application using rules. This has the hidden advantage of also enabling you to automatically track object interaction coverage across your application under test via automation. This has enabled us to reduce our code footprint from over 250,000+ lines of code to just 6,000, whilst automating most of what would usually be a manual process of producing code.

Once again however as you can see we’re now referring to frameworks, and not the tools themselves. Obviously building the frameworks themselves takes time and skill. The real skill is making the frameworks generic enough that they are no longer application dependant.