ReadyAPI Reviews

We have a product, a financial application, that uses a lot of services to connect to our backend systems, so we use ReadyAPI to test those services. Primarily, we use it to build out or mimic the exact services that the development team uses. Second, we use it to build out scripts in Groovy to automate certain scenarios and verify without any manual intervention.

The feature that allows you to import an API collection or a project is valuable. It reduces a lot of manual effort to give the endpoint and the parameters, etc. If the development team gives me the collection, I can directly import it into  ReadyAPI and it maps the entire project so that I can start hitting the APIs directly.

There is a lot of room for improvement, mainly from the point of view of integrating ReadyAPI into the CI pipelines, and also the scripting aspect into Bitbucket. ReadyAPI is an extremely good and efficient standalone tool, but if you're collaborating on a project, it kind of becomes like a bottleneck. For use as a tool for group collaboration, there is some room for improvement.

I would like to see two new features. Number one is version control with Bitbucket or Git, where we can actually see the scripts and have meaningful pull requests. Right now, everything sits inside an XML file, so it's very hard to review the code that anybody writes. If I have a ReadyAPI project, I want to not only have it on my local machine, but also in a version control system like Git or Bitbucket. At this time I can put the project there, but it's very hard to decipher the files that ReadyAPI exposes. It would be nice for them to have it more like a .gui file where the formatting of the file and the readability of the code is easier for other individuals.

Second, is integration into a continuous integration pipeline, like a CI pipeline, where we can easily trigger, via Bamboo or Jenkins, and execute the scripts and maybe get the response of the results via an email or notification. Maybe it also needs integration into tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack, to get immediate feedback about the results of our execution. Those would be the new improvements I would like to see in their upcoming versions.

I have been using ReadyAPI for the past four and a half years.

I think ReadyAPI is very stable as a standalone tool. I haven't had much experience with using it with cloud or CI, but overall, my impressions are that it is a very solid and stable tool. There's no flakiness in it. As long as you have the right licenses and internet, it's pretty solid. It doesn't hang or crash. The time it takes to hit the API responses and process data is pretty much seamless.

I think there is a lot of improvement required from the scalability point of view. 

Anywhere between 20-50 people use the solution at the moment, but that can go up to around 100 users. 

One time I got help from the technical support team, and they were good. They were able to understand my issue and resolve it within a couple of days. 

As long as you have access to the right licenses, it's a very straightforward setup. 

I deployed the solution in-house and it was up and ready within a few hours. ReadyAPI already has documentation, so I made use of that to set up the project on my machine. Installation was pretty easy and straightforward since I had the right licenses and followed along with the documentation.

We have a team who handles the maintenance. We have at least three people on that team who work in DevOps, but their time is not required every single day. I would say minimal time and effort is needed for maintenance. It's mainly to check to see if a new version of ReadyAPI is out there, and see if it works with our internal company systems. Are there any restrictions? Are there any firewall rules that need to be opened or any IT support required? Maintenance is needed just to check those things. I've never heard anybody complaining or having any issues with it.

I don't have a quantification metric, but I would say there is a lot of return on investment. That's the reason we keep on renewing the licenses even though it's maybe slightly on the expensive side. It allows us to identify a lot of issues by just using the tool, and as long as we use the tool appropriately, there is a lot of value in it for us. 

I'm not familiar with the pricing specifics, but I would say it's somewhere in the middle. I don't think it's too expensive. I would give the pricing a three out of five. 

The thing with ReadyAPI is that you have to buy different licenses for different purposes. The license that we have is mainly for functional testing, but if you want to run security tests or scans, you need to purchase a separate license. If you want to run performance tests, you need a separate license. I am not aware of one single license available for all the features of ReadyAPI, but it would be nice for them to have one license for everything rather than having individual separate licenses.

We didn't switch from another tool, but the other solution or alternative that we use is called Postman. Postman doesn't entirely replace ReadyAPI because ReadyAPI has many other features that make it stand out on its own merit. It has options to perform load testing and security testing, not just functional API services testing.

At the moment, we are mainly focused on functional API services testing, so there are some teams who use Postman, but I think it's mainly due to convenience and the level of comfort that each engineer has with ReadyAPI. Many prefer to use ReadyAPI as compared to Postman.

I would say that it's a very strong tool by itself. I haven't seen any other tool that matches the capabilities from a standalone point of view. If your goal is, "Hey, I have a bunch of services I want to test and play around with and even automate some testing around on a standalone machine," ReadyAPI is very powerful and capable and has a lot of benefits. 

It saves a lot of time for future testing, so if I want to repeat a test over and over again every single day, it saves time. It has good source connections, such as a database or an Excel or adjacent file. It can take the source input in various formats, and it can give the output in various formats, like Excel, or it can also write it into a database. It has that integration available with other technologies.

I think it is trying to improve itself by having integrations into Bamboo, Jenkins and Jira, but it's bit late in the game there. I think there's still a lot of work to do on the CI.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten. 

Our web application is completely dependent on backend APIs. Instead of automating all the clients' use cases, we make sure that all the backend APIs are automated and are false-proof so that any issues can be tackled upfront. 

On the client side, we have a UI where a user will interact with the application. On that end, it's simply the API that is being called and is fished through the UI that is getting rendered. We capture all those APIs and connect them using ReadyAPI.

We use ReadyAPI to automate our APIs and make sure that all the individual APIs are automated with different possible positive cases and negative cases. Then, we use an end-to-end test where we used to have multiple APIs. In the past, we used to combine all the APIs for a scenario, whereby a particular API would get a value that we would pass to other APIs. In the final result, we have assertions, the Groovy script, which is in ReadyAPI.

For anyone who does not have experience with automation, ReadyAPI provides a sense of comfort, especially for testers who find it hard to go directly into coding. It is a good solution to start with.

ReadyAPI has a cool feature called Smart Assertion. This feature lets you add different values to your response which can be asserted, and you'll be able to modify that. It requires a click of a button and the assertion will get added. 

The assertion which is currently built into the tool would be more than enough in 95% of the scenarios. In less than 5% of the scenarios would you need to write a code to make sure something needs to be really asserted. 

ReadyAPI has been around for a while, it's stable, and it's from a strong brand, SmartBear.

The solution is not user-friendly. It is a difficult tool to use. ReadyAPI is slow, taking two to three minutes to start and launch. As your project gets bigger, the time to load takes even longer.

ReadyAPI is not lightweight, it is a heavy tool. There are lots of options within the solution, however, they are not upfront or user-friendly. 

The solution's UI has a clumsy setup. On the left side, you have a list of all the test sites, followed by the test cases and the test steps. On the right side, there are two levels of division. Shown at the top is everything and at the bottom, the values you are passing will be shown. The variables that are getting passed globally within the test suite level will hide somewhere. Even after using the tool for a while, you need to click on a specific button to know that the value is being passed. I would like a UI that shows everything that is important upfront to avoid unnecessary clicks.

If performance improved with the UI changes, I would prefer this solution, as it achieves everything other products and tools offer.

I have been using ReadyAPI for two years.

The solution is stable. I have not faced a situation where ReadyAPI was down. It is always running. It runs slow, but it is always running.

ReadyAPI is scalable. At one point in time, we had eight people working with the product. Each of us would add our test and add to our repository. We also added it to our nightly run, on the weekly and daily runs.

We had to connect with technical support at ReadyAPI one time. We could not get the Bitbucket repository to ReadyAPI. The installation was correct and successful, but we were not able to import the repository to ReadyAPI even after providing the GitHub key. We sent customer service an email and got a response with steps on how to resolve the issue. 

Most of our concerns are dealt with in the online community. SmartBear has been around for a while, so many issues are already answered online in the frequently asked questions section.

Overall, I would rate their customer service and support a four out of five.

Positive

Prior to using ReadyAPI we used Jira. The decision to switch was made at the leadership level.

The initial setup of ReadyAPI is not too tough. It is important to make sure that the executable file has all the correct options. 

After installing ReadyAPI, you need to point it to your repository, either GitHub or Bitbucket, where your code resides. Then it will take about two hours  to initialize and to get the test loaded.

If somebody really wants to use ReadyAPI to implement API automation, I would suggest different tools rather than ReadyAPI. 

If they have already chosen to implement ReadyAPI, I would recommend that they have a mentor and a proper training plan in place. Even someone who has experience working with API automation will not be able to start immediately and use the solution. My advice is to learn the tool perfectly because there is a good chance that they will miss some of the key features which will definitely ease their work. Once they know all the small tricks and tips, it's really an easy tool.

Overall, I would rate this product a six out of ten.

ReadyAPI is where I've created the test tools I've used. I use it for functional testing.

I've used it for testing my code, as in for the unit testing basically, and also the functional tests. We had to perform all types of unit tests. 

We could test all the scenarios of the code, all possible scenarios before it goes to QA. We used Excel files to import the data so that we could test the majority of the data.

The Excel sheet feature is good. It allows for data-driven testing, basically the testing where I can load an Excel file. This was the most useful since, if we had to create a test suite every time for new data, that would typically be a lot of work to fill in the data. When we did it in the Excel sheet, in each row, we could put the data in each and then just copy and paste and simply change whichever column we wanted to change. This helps us test a lot of data at one particular point in time.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution can scale. 

Many times, when I'm testing the code, and it is deployed at a particular server when using ReadyAPI, and I'm getting an error. However, it's actually not an error in the code. For example, sometimes, if I changed something in ReadyAPI, it would not quickly pick up the change. It used to give me the same error repeatedly, and when I closed the application completely and restarted it, it would pick up that change. There was a lag for me while using ReadyAPI.

I don't know as to how it works at the backend, how it picks up the changes, and what functionality or code they use at their end; however, I would want it to be more functional to take in the changes. If I've made a request and I change something in it, it should not lag. It should be able to recognize that this is a change and should be able to pick that change up so that it does not give me the same error over and over again.

The solution does not notify you that you are about to lose your license. They need to give you some small timeframe so you can finish what you are doing and restart without losing work.

I work as an integration developer, so for testing my code and my web services, in the beginning, I used SoapUI, and then I moved to ReadyAPI. I've used it for almost five to six years.

The solution is stable. I don't know if it's a business perspective or something since it was a little difficult for us only when we had to get the licenses, so we used to face problems when our organization bought only so many licenses.

I don't know if they could make licensing more flexible. Since it was difficult to obtain a license, that was a shortcoming with the solution. Sometimes it would time out if I left my system for some time and came back. The work I was doing, if the license is lost, meant I had to set it up all over again, put the license back, and then start testing again.

There have been some bugs occasionally.

The solution scales well.

There were codes and services that were very complex or lengthy, so we created test suites for one code, which made everything easier.

I'd use the tool, as well as the test team. We'd do all kinds of testing, and it could handle it all. 

Between 200 and 300 people are using the solution. Almost all of the developers would use it for testing. 

I haven't used technical support or know of anyone who has. 

I've also used SoapUI. I use SoapUI now. 

ReadyAPI has much more functionalities and is more scalable. Smaller organizations maybe with small budgets or less services, use SoapUI. When companies need more scalability and functionality, they use ReadyAPI.

The implementation process is very straightforward. You just install it from an installer, and you could go on and start working on it from there. It's not very messy, and it's not very lengthy. You could just simply install and start.

I'd rate the ease of implementation 4.5 or five out of five.

I was not involved with the licensing aspect of the solution. I'm not sure what the pricing is. However, it's my understanding that the solution isn't too flexible in terms of licensing, and people sometimes struggle with that aspect of the product. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'm using somewhere near the latest version of the solution. 

ReadyAPI it's pretty straightforward and offers many helpful features. Also, many things automatically get integrated into ReadyAPI. It's quite a useful tool.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use ReadyAPI for API testing. We have microservices, and we are using it for the API testing on them.

We are using it for testing. We test all the API calls. Without it, we cannot release anything. It helps us find issues with the implemented APIs. 

It can create stress tests very fast, and some features help you do it fast. 

It has nice things, like making data-driven testing that is fairly quick and easy to do.

The solution is stable.

Its basic pricing is fair.

It's scalable. 

I don't like how they don't have a clear way to manage tests between multiple projects. You cannot have a massive project with all the tests. With multiple projects, you have to get the API created all over again, and I'm not aware of any other solution in case you're using an APIX where you have to define that in all the projects that you are using. That's kind of a pain. You have to keep defining it, and only then can you use it. I like to break up the projects into something that's manageable. However, it makes that a little challenging. 

Sometimes, in trying to make creating tests faster, there are issues. It makes it easier to search and replace variables or anything if I'm writing it and using, say, any of the programming languages. However, with this one, it is very hard. You cannot search for a specific test. Any of those things are impossible. That is one of the big issues that I don't like. I'd often wish I could transition to something like Python or things like that.

In the next release, I would like to see a way by which we can share the code between multiple projects. Each project is an XML file. I cannot use code more than once unless I go and manually copy the code I create in one project into a different one. I'm not aware of any better way to do that.

The solution can be a little pricey.

I've used the solution for over six years. 

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. We haven't seen it crash or freeze. 

Our system is quite scalable. We have many things that handle auto-scaling groups, which scales quite well. We have quite a bit of devices, millions of devices, and each time it scales very well. There's no problem with it. We have never had problems due to an area that didn't allow us to scale. 

There may be 50 million devices talking to our cloud. It's quite sizeable. 

I'm not sure if there are plans to increase usage. 

We are currently servicing ourselves and our customers well. I'm not aware of any plans to increase. I'm not aware of any growth plans.

We are supporting the solution. Our engineers are supporting everything, so there is no separate support group or outside assistance. 

If our team needs help, we get it through SMartBear. It's proper. You have to write to them and wait for a reply. It's not bad. With support, we have gone for a single-user license, so given that this is the best they can do, it could be better in that we could pay more and get more service. I wish I could have someone to talk with just to figure out how I can solve some of the problems I've had.

I haven't had any user group meetings or anything like that. They don't do any of those things. Occasionally they will have a webinar that might cover an aspect of the solution. Sometimes you're so busy you don't have time to go to those things.

We've always used this solution. We started by using this product.

Everything is deployed on AWS. There is a deployment engineer who's doing the deployment. I don't know too much about it. We don't use anything like CD, CI/CD, or anything like that since we don't have the people to do those things. It's all manual. We have just one person (that's an architect) that handles deployment and maintenance. 

Each deployment could take anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour.

In terms of ROI, in our situation, I'm the only one using it. It helps me for my purposes and this is precisely what we are using it for, for API testing, which actually helps us find issues. I'm not sure what the ROI would be.

Desktop licensing is not bad. However, if you go higher than that, they're a little pricey, I would say. 

For each license, they charge the same amount, which is less than $1,000 for each desktop license.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'm using an installed version. It's installed on my desktop. We're using the most up-to-date version. 

I'd advise potential new users to look at many other tools. Do some detailed analysis of things like Postman and those other tools too, and then if you have more technical experts, try Python or others, including JavaScript-based ones. See which would be best. Consider how you would use it as well. That way, you'll be picking the right tool. 

I'd rate it five out of ten.

I'm using ReadyAPI for services, automation, security testing, and manual updates.

The most valuable features of ReadyAPI are the scripting tools and the connectivity to external data sources, such as Excel and PDF files. There are plenty of useful features that are useful, such as automating flexibility and usability. Overall, the solution is easy to use.

The reporting in ReadyAPI could be better. It can become sloppy, sometimes it works and other times it does not.

I have been using ReadyAPI for approximately seven years.

ReadyAPI is a stable solution.

When I was using an older version of the solution I had to use community support online. I have not contacted support from ReadyAPI directly.

The initial setup of ReadyAPI is easy. You only need to install it.

ReadyAPI is one of the best tools which is available in the market to automate and test manually.

Most of our employees know how to use the solution well and value it.

Utilizing ReadyAPI is highly recommended. It's a user-friendly and efficient tool that can meet your fundamental requirements, both in manual and automated methods. It's a reliable tool that's easy to use and there aren't many better alternatives available.

I rate ReadyAPI a seven out of ten.

I'm using the solution for API testing. My developer developed their APIs in Postman, so ReadyAPI has this integration factor, and from there, I exported my APIs and imported them into ReadyAPI. Every API I convert into a functional test. 

The conversion of the testing and the conversion of those APIs into a functional test is a great aspect of the solution. 

It's priced well. When I compared it with the Tosca, Eggplant, or other tools that offer API testing open source, this came out on top. 

This is a scriptless, codeless tool. 

It's easy to implement.

This is a stable product.

In general, they just need to be better. They have performance testing also. However, it's not that great. It's costly when it comes to a small company, and the features are not that smooth. While the application testing is fine, the API performance testing needs work.

Maintaining your scripts does take work. 

I've been using the solution for one year.

It's stable and reliable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is pretty good. 

Right now, I'm the only person using the solution. I'm not sure how scalable it is.

I purchased the license from a vendor based in India, and when I have any issues, I reach out to them directly. I create an incident ticket, and they help resolve the issue. Usually, it takes two or three working days to sort a problem out. It's a bit delayed. However, it's not bad.

Neutral

The solution is simple to implement and very straightforward. 

You have a license manager that you have to install in your license server or machine, and then you just have to install the instance of ReadyAPI.

The pricing was well within our budget. It's reasonable and not too expensive. 

We pay $3,000 annually for a floating license. actually. That allows another person from my company to use it as well. It's a cloud-based license. 

I'm an end-user.

I'd advise new users that this is not a free tool. If you don't have a budget, you can go try Postman. However, if you have $4,000 or $5,000 a year, ReadyAPI is one of the best tools to use. It is easy to learn, and it is easy to work with. The features are very good.

In general, I would recommend this tool to others. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We mainly use this solution for testing APIs, and we also use it for load testing. SmartBear has a free version as well, which is called SoapAPI, but it does not include all of the features we wanted, so we got the paid version. The pro version has many benefits, including the load testing and more features for the API testing as well. Since we are mainly focused on backend testing, we thought it would be useful for us to have this license.

We had been using Postman, but Postman only has a couple of solutions to automate the API tests, and with ReadyAPI we can do both the API testing and the load testing. I haven't seen any other tool that offers both types of tests in a single tool. This is very helpful for us, and it's one of the main reasons why we chose this service.

We have an older version of ReadyAPI and it's not supporting our whole tests, so we have had to migrate some or we've had difficulties running them because they're very old script. Better compatibility or more support for the older versions would be helpful. 

Also, I've been seeing the same UI for many years, since I was using the free version, and the paid version looks the same. I think the UI could be a little bit better.

I have had experience with this solution for about five years.

The solution is stable almost all of the time. I'm not exactly sure if any other users are getting hang or not, but I have never faced an issue with hanging.

The scalability of the solution is good. I think about 150 testers in our organization use ReadyAPI. About 250 to 300 of our developers use the free version, SoapUI, to do basic API testing.

I think the support is good, but it's not immediate because we have many layers. If I have a question, I take it to a person in my organization, and then they contact tech support. It doesn't take too long, maybe one or two days, but I usually go to the SmartBear community online and look for an answer there. 

I used Postman to test the APIs, but with Postman it's just the basic testing, like unit testing. To do an intensive level of regression testing or load testing, Postman doesn't help much. It is still good to use for the manual part, but for automation, I feel like ReadyAPI is better.

This tool is very easy to set up and install because you can download ReadyAPI and you just need the product key. It was done in a matter of minutes.

We have an employee who deals directly with the access keys and maintenance. I think I have been on this specific project for about a year and a half, and I have only seen a maintenance window two times, and they typically don't last long or they do it in the off-times so they don't really affect my work.

I would say they should know exactly what they're looking for because if they're looking for API testing, this is a perfect tool. If they want to automate the process, then go ahead and use ReadyAPI. It is the best tool that I have ever seen for API testing. However, if you're just using it for manual API testing, I would say get the trial version or use Postman. We also use JMeter for performance or load testing, but ReadyAPI gives both API and load testing. If you want to do both, this is a good tool.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten because we haven't integrated it yet with any deployment tools, so I don't know how difficult that process will be. 

Our primary use case of ReadyAPI is as a testing tool for mock data testing. I'm a technical consultant and we are customers of this solution. 

I like that it's easy to automate within our deployment and to have the ability for more data-driven testing. ReadyAPI is also easy to integrate. 

I would ideally like to see a more user-friendly UI to replace what is currently there. Secondly, we never know when there's going to be a license upgrade and it would be helpful to receive an automated email prior to license expiry or some kind of auto-enabled system for license upgrades to give us an alert or some kind of notification before the license expires.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

The solution is stable and reliable. 

I think scaling up and down is possible. There are 10 users of this solution in my team but there would be many others throughout the company. We only use the solution for certain projects so it's not used on a daily basis. 

The customer support is good; they are very knowledgeable and they respond quickly. I was quite impressed.

Positive

I would advise anyone considering implementing this solution to look at the Smartbear documentation on ReadyAPI in order to explore new ways to implement it according to customer requirements and to understand how the product operates.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.