Ranorex Studio Reviews

I develop some test scripts on this solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The solution is intuitive and pretty self-sustaining. You don't need a lot of help with it in terms of setup or assistance. 

The product is stable.

Technical support is responsive and helpful.

I just have my typical issues with any kind of automation tool where small changes require a lot of maintenance for me to be able to rerun the tests with some consistency. That really happens with any product that I've used so far, however. 

The other part of the tool that could use some improvement is I have an issue with the way it communicates with what they call runtime versions on remote stations. It's usually any minor firewall change or anything changed in our security system that seems to throw me off for a few days where I have to troubleshoot it and figure out why it's not working.

I'd like to be able to remotely record. It's not really an option unless I buy the main product. If I buy two licenses for it, I'd have that functionality. I'd like the main development side of it to be able to remotely record some of my scripts on remote machines.

I'd like to know their testing strategies and to know what they can automate and what they can't. It can become pretty frustrating if you're trying to automate something that changes on a monthly or weekly basis. 

I've been using the solution for about two years or so at this point. 

The solution has been fairly stable. I've only had a couple of crashes over two years. It's been a pretty decent product that way. Usually, if I have a problem, there's an update that happens fairly quickly and I can update the product fairly easily.

Technical support is basically email support. I don't really have to call in. When I do have a major issue, and I've had a couple of issues with what's called a repository of objects, I've had someone call me a couple of times. For the most part, it's just a quick email and they send me a resolution to it usually fairly quickly. They are pretty responsive.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only complexity was due to the fact that it uses a licensing model where any of my remote systems has to talk to a service on my main machine that has to use a specific port. Sometimes I have some issues with that. Initially, it took a while to set them up and get them to be able to talk to each other. Once I got it running, was been pretty consistent and has been for a while now.

We handled the deployment in-house and did not need the assistance of consultants or integrators. 

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at about an eight out of ten. The reason I give it an eight - and I have pretty high standards - is it's not something where I needed somebody to guide me through installing it and preparing it and preparing my workstation. It's pretty self-sufficient that way and that's the type of product I like where I'm not having to go back to the vendor constantly.

My main piece of advice is to understand your environment and what you require. And understand what you can automate your tests on and what you can't. You can spend a lot of time on this and end up with nothing after.

• 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.

This solution is used to automate registration tests. This prevents the need to manually run the tests which takes a lot of time.

I like the recording function and Ranorex Spy.

I would like to be able to customize the data grids. They are currently written in Visual Basic and we are unable to get down to the cell level without hard-code.

I have been using this solution for about a month.

This is a stable solution.

We currently have two users and have plans to expand the number of users in a month or two.

Support was able to help us well during the initial setup.

We used Rational Robot and Coded UI in the past and still use them to a certain extent, though they are becoming obsolete. Ranorex is more up-to-date and provides more support for testing.

The initial setup for this solution was straightforward. It took us a few days to set up two virtual machines - one for the database and another for the clients and Ranorex.

The setup was mostly done by our in-house team with the occasional support from Ranorex. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• 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.

My clients are using Ranorex Studio for functional testing automatization.

The most valuable feature of Ranorex Studio is the capture and replay tool. You don't need to do script testing. When you launch any application from Ranorex Studio it automatically captures these test case steps. The next time you can replay the tool the flow automatically happens again. For example, when you do the logging and all the activity will be captured by the tool, and re-execute the same step by using automatization.

We are mainly working for manufacturing OEMs but the integration is not available. It would be a benefit if they built one integration tool for all the Teamcenter home servers and software as the main PLM data source. It is a simple process at this time, the integration could be made easier.

I have been using Ranorex Studio for approximately two years.

We are using out-of-the-box features only with Ranorex Studio and the stability has been good.

I rate the stability of Ranorex Studio a four out of five.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We only have two engineers using this tool for automating their business use cases.

I rate the scalability of Ranorex Studio a four out of five.

I have not contacted the support from Ranorex Studio because we have not had any issues.

Ranorex Studio is straightforward to do the initial setup. There is a lot of flexibility given to understand the functionality, it's very easy to understand the existing functionality, and what is available in desktop applications.

The full deployment does not take more than a day with everything updated and the scripts running.

We use two engineers for the deployment of the solution.

I rate Ranorex Studio a nine out of ten.

• It supports two languages C#.Net and VB.NET
• We use Ranorex Spy, Ranorex Repository, User Functions, Modules, Run Configurations, Data Driven Testing and Cross Browser, Cross Platform Testing
• It has very good integration with Visual Studio, Jenkins and Testlink
• Cross platform testing
• Reporting capability and error handling capabilities are one of the best
• GDI Capability allows to identify un-recognizable objects

I implemented this tool for several of my customers and I can see the ROI rightaway. The tool is very easy to use and test automation can be started rightaway and improvements can be done later on. Perhaps this is the only tool where I would reply on Record and Playback because it just does excellent job same as manually adding automated test steps.

We automated hundreds of regression tests using this tool and they run every weekend and every time the test fails, an email is sent out. Earlier we used to run one big round of regression test every quarter but now we do it every week. Huge savings!!

• Built in web services testing functionality is required
• Built-in file comparison would be very handy
• Support for Mac and Linux would be handy, it supports only Windows

We had no issues with deployment.

I personally think that, perhaps, it is one of the most stable automated tools available in the market. You can rely on your tests and it won’t let you down.

We've had no issues scaling it.

I would recommend reading through the user guide, the guide is very comprehensive and provides a lot of examples of best practises Buy Runtime Engine licenses for execution rather than full Ranorex Studio license. Make use of Cross Browser Testing as far as possible (Automate once and run on multiple browsers). Use variables and data fields that have consistent names (like $UserName and $Password). 

Use data-driven testing, which allows to run the same test over and over with different data while getting consistent and verifiable results. Use the data to feed and to validate the system. Create small and distinct tests and you can always combine them in the test case. By keeping the tests small and simple you decrease the overhead of maintenance. Don’t automate tests which are run only once, try to automated repetitive tests.

We use Ranorex for automating the testing of the GUI components in our applications.

Code Conversion is one of the great features because sometimes, the automation tool doesn't have the capability of maneuvering around two specific evaluations. Using the code conversion option means that you can easily write the code the way you want.

The object detection functionality needs to be improved.  We have found that when you are selecting objects by moving the mouse, and then the position of these objects change in the newer versions of the application, the test tool fails to correctly identify them.

We have been using Ranorex for about three years.

Stability is fine and we have had no problem with it.

We haven't had any problems in terms of scalability. We have more than five people using it, and their roles range from developer to management.

We have been in contact with technical support and they are responsive. It is fair to say that they have resolved our issues quickly.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The licensing fees depend on the number of users.

When we started using this tool a few years ago, we had finished an evaluation where Ranorex was the winner in terms of capability.

We will be working on new products and we are in the process of looking at more test automation tools. Right now, we are investigating Telerik Test Studio to see if it has more capability than Ranorex.

My advice for anybody who is considering Ranorex is that it is a powerful tool, it is far-reaching, and it works as advertised. In my opinion, it is one of the best tools available in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The ability to create test scripts with the flexibility to run them as a whole or as individual test steps within the script. This greatly reduces the amount of time spent creating test scripts.

With completed test automation suites we have greatly reduced the amount of time spent manually regression testing after each software release.

The only real complaints I would have would be a bit of quirkiness in the UI at times, but no application is perfect.

I have used it for about five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Ranorex customer service has been prompt the couple of times I have contacted them. There was one instance where I had an issue and contacted them for a solution they were unable to provide it, and I ended up finding a work around on my own. The Ranorex user blog is al helpful platform.

The initial set-up is very basic, download the executable and run it just like most other programs.

We implemented the product in-house. The only tricky part is if using their floating license option, the configurations need to be set up across the network. My current organization is small so we experienced no issues. Implementing on a much larger scale could be a bit tricky.

The ROI would be the man hours saved by implementing the Automation suite.

The pricing for this tool is acceptable for the amount of features it provides and as for licensing we are small company and only have two licenses. I believe they offer some savings based on the number of licenses purchased.

The ROI would be the man hours saved by implementing the automation suite. The pricing for this tool is acceptable for the amount of features it provides and as for licensing we are small company and only have two licenses. I believe they offer some savings based on the number of licenses purchased.

Based on my experience, this would be my tool of choice for test automation. There are many out there but I have yet to find one that offers all of the features mentioned above in one package.