Ranorex Studio Reviews

Through Ranorex, we are automating our test cases done for our internal CRM solution. We are using the keyword-driven approach available in Ranorex, and we get benefits from the essential support for Dynamics CRM (all versions). We are using also the runtime feature that runs the test suite independently on the server.

With this product we are continuously getting rid of manual regression tests that had to happen each deployment manually by key users. It brings more accuracy in regression tests, more time for involved people for their daily tasks, and more confidence to the application. In the future we plan to incorporate automatic execution in the continuous integration process.

It needs a better connection to TFS.

We have been using it for six months in my department.

The application is more stable by comparison to other products on the market that we have considered for test automation.

Communication with the Ranorex support was very effective and straightforward in early phase of incorporating Ranorex into our internal infrastructure. Ranorex is providing us with best practice sessions and code reviews. We appreciate their very quick purchasing cycle.

In the beginning we had small problem with configuring Ranorex License manager in our infrastructure due to our firewall and proxy settings, but with the help of Ranorex support we quickly found the fix to solve the issue.

We implemented it with an in-house team with the help of a vendor team, but I expect that for companies with less strict network security policies, it would be less of a problem.

With the incorporation of Ranorex and automation testing in general we are saving a lot of time for our internal people. ROI is calculated at about one year approximately.

We have purchased the premium license with an enterprise package, which includes special care from Ranorex such as code review, high priority in issue solving etc.

We had an evaluation period to choose most suitable product from ones available on the market and during that we have tried many of them. We have discovered that Ranorex has native support for all technologies and products used within our company, such as SAP, all Microsoft Dynamics products, SharePoint, Kentico, web based portals and others including support for mobile testing. Also, it beats the others in stability, because other products crashed very often once using recording module.

If you are looking for an automation tool that is easy to implement, easy to understand, and works with most of technologies on the market, Ranorex is the appropriate solution for you. So far I can only recommend this product.

The ability to use code (C#) to control the testing operations as well as the minimal training to get team members up to speed and productive have been valuable features for us.

As a company, we have tried several approaches to institute automated front-end testing with limited short term success. Currently, we are in full production executing thousands of test cases, multiple time per sprints across various platforms. By doing this we have freed up the team to -

1. Do more automation; and
2. Conduct in-depth testing not done previously.

The end results are a significant drop in customer-found defects.

I would like to see Ranorex come up with a load balancing tool for test execution. For example, if I set up 10 VMs as UI clients I would love to be able to provide this group to the test suite so it would send test executions to the next available client. The result would be that I finish testing as soon as possible. 

Also, I would like to see the popup watchers be launched conditionally, and not each as a thread running in the background. For example, if there is a hang in the execution you launch a watcher and check for condition A. If not condition A then launch second watcher and look for condition B.

We have been using Ranorex as our primary UI automation tool for over three years.

We did in fact encounter problems when deploying the tool and to some degree we are still handling some of these problems. The first problem we came across was not unique to Ranorex but was the fact that our front end was applet based and none of the tools explored could interact with the applets in any consistent way. 

We had tried out several tools including the high-end HP suite (with help from one of their architects) with very unstable results. When it came to Ranorex, at least it was stable and we were able to consistently run X,Y coordinate scenarios. Base on that we instrumented the applet code and were able to access it via the User Code modules.

We have in fact had several failed attempts at automation with our product and have been evaluating tools all along. The reason we ultimately settled on Ranorex was a combination of its current state and our being able to overcome problems as the occurred.

Setup is simple and straightforward. The integration with SVN was simple, and the license server was very simple.

By our calculations we are now getting a return of 50% time saved in team efforts, making the team 50% more productive.

It’s always a good idea to negotiate price with vendors to get the best possible deals balance the numbers of licenses with the group/bulk discounts.

Given the makeup and technical level of our entire team and the product we are developing. This was and continues to be a good fit.

Make sure it fits with your team goals and products. Consider the profiles of folk you will need to hire to implement and maintain the testing. There is a stigma with being in QA as opposed to being a developer, so you may implement a tool that is hard to hire for. Take for example Selenium, lots of QA want it on their resume because they can demand more compensation, the profile needed is that of a developer.

Sample results

Element Identification, I really liked the way Ranorex created a way (XPath) to identify their solution for maintaining stored elements in the repository.

The product supports multiple repositories and the ability to sort and maintain the repository in a positive way. I used the repository in combination with shared functions to pretty easily create reusable functions, that only needed repository maintenance with code changes.

I would like it to be more intuitive to use, especially in test management. I'd also like the ability to maintain and access tests in a more intuitive/structured way .

We've been using it for two months.

It was unstable at times, locking out – especially on any virtual or remote desktop machines. The lockout required resetting Ranorex.

High – it was pretty easy to get help on things we were stuck on, especially in the early stages of product discovery.

High – it was pretty easy to get help on things we were stuck on, especially in the early stages of product discovery.

Straightforward, easy to setup, great support from Ranorex team for initial setup and initial training.

Implemented this one through an in-house team.

We evaluated many different products for the engagement. We went with Ranorex due to its relative ease of use, and its support for automating desktop/WPF applications out of the box.

My advice for implementation is to do a proof of concept first to ensure this product works for you.

Do your research, all products have their positives and negatives. Assemble a list of requirements, interview vendors and other users of the product, go through strenuous Proof of concept phase – evaluating and analyzing how well the product fits your current and future needs.

• Spy
• CodeModule
• XPath

Automation coverage overnight is very useful. Compared to Selenium, Ranorex has a very small learning curve, so most of the technical QA people can start development with it right away.

They need to have modularity (running concurrently different parts of the tests on different environments and reporting back to centralized run centre). Currently we are implementing this functionality via code, but feature should give a lot of advantages.

I've used it for three years.

The scalability is limited to one process. You cannot have multiple reports combined together automatically, because each run is independent.

The support is pretty good, they have been able to work out some bugs with their licensing and they seems to be pretty helpful in general. The forum is the best advantage, because it's a pretty big community of coders share problem/solution there.

Selenium was in use before Ranorex. Ranorex have a great starter's guide for people that have never done automation. Selenium problems will lead to huge stack traces and unclear errors, while Ranorex stripped out a lot out of basic Visual Studio, so the majority of errors are pretty easy to describe and fix.

The initial set-up is easy for an experienced person, and for technical QA, without a lot of automation experience. Ranorex is a great tool to learn automation with pleasure.

In-house implementation. It's great to have Ranorex paired with Bamboo and AWS

Floating licensing are good for running the scripts on different machines (runtime). For developing, we are using node-locked ones, because Ranorex requires Windows, so we need to buy Windows laptops. It's the biggest drawback of Ranorex that it's limited to one operating system.

You need to have several windows environments for development. You can use Ubuntu or Mac for running tests inside AWS windows box, but development is better or native windows.

We primarily use this as client solutions for test automation and administration.

We using XPath standard out of the box with success finding the containers and its elements.

It gives us various options to work as a consultancy with our different size clients.

The application test automation is the most valuable feature as well as being the one feature we use the most.

While the product does well with its primary job of testing, when we are using Ranorex it would be nice if it would report directly in HTML. We have to use another tool for that and that means that the distribution becomes a little bit more complicated than should be necessary. It is a bigger factor especially when testing is more complicated.

So having either better integration with a secondary tool or having those functionalities added to the platform would be a nice addition and simplify our process. There is a basic reporting module and we are using JIRA in addition in order to change the report formatting. So we need to have an interface from Ranorex and JIRA. It is there, but limited. If Ranorex did the reporting directly, we could easily make the result more compliant with what our management team would expect with no additional steps.

We have been using this product for about six months on a daily basis.

It is a very stable solution and that is a reason why we are using it. While we normally use it for enterprise businesses, we might choose it as a solution for businesses with a range of 50 to 1,000 employees.

The product will scale very easily. We have some questions about the license type because we need two types of license to keep it going. I get a lot of tests from our management group and we find if you can skip purchasing some licenses, you can save some money. It seems to be that we need both licenses for one tester.

Working with customer support is very easy. They have a chat channel which you can talk to. They also have FQA so when you have some easier questions you can use that channel. When you have some specific testing that becomes a little bit more difficult. We are working with this and we are using it together with Siemens sometimes. To get to the right answers, that answer may come off of Siemens or off of Ranorex. It's not always really clear. Everyone will not have that same situation.

Katalon studio, we changed on support issues, when it became free

For me the initial setup is straightforward. There is more than just the testing administration to sets up, but also you configure the tech management and reporting management. It is a few things to do, but I am familiar with them so it is not hard.

We are doing all the installations and developing ourselves. So everything is in house.

for clients we integrate Ranorex together with Polarion ( a Siemens supported test studio) to automate tests in a HMI/PLC domain, using WinCC-OA -> HMI functional tests to automate, this also includes receipts (for BIO clients & test automation)

Vesrsion control between Ranorex / Polarion is an important issue.

There are standard and premium licensing plans on a fixed price. I am not sure of the cost at this time. However, in our case, we find we need two different types of licensing to meet our requirements for clients and management. It depends on the client because we are a consultancy and serve small, medium and enterprise businesses.

As a consultant, we may choose to work other products in addition to or instead of Ranorex. It will depend on client needs. So yes, we do evaluate other tools but Ranorex fits many situations.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the product as an eight for what it does for us.

For those people in the market looking for an application testing solution, I would recommend evaluating the product and the type of projects you will need it for. I would recommend making an evaluation and comparison with other products to be sure that the needs for testing can be covered in the functionality of the Ranorex. The Ranorex is a studio, of course, so you will have lots of options to apply in ongoing test management and test automation. In my experience, those issues are all covered in Ranorex.

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 has a good UI recognition and it is easy to maintain the tests. The RanoreXPath is very powerful and makes it possible to set-up a strong UI recognition even when the design is slightly redesigned. Also reporting is very useful with good description of the executed steps and screenshots when tests fail.

It made it possible to automate a lot of processes in our Windows Forms applications, and we also plan on using it in a web application. Now, we’re able to execute tests overnight which would be forgotten if we only had manual tests.

It would be nice to have a way to indicate the coverage of the tests of the application. Currently there’s nothing available for this, and it’s difficult for Ranorex to have a good implementation of this feature. We need to say that Ranorex gives a lot of support and listens to their customers when there are requests for features.

We’ve been using this for about two years. We started by using the trial version, and making some test cases. and soon it was clear to us that this was the tool we needed. After two years we’re still expanding the use of the software. We're also constantly updating the software.

At first we needed to become familiar with the software and it took some time to set-up a stable test environment but we were able to become this in the last few months. We’re using Ranorex in combination with Jenkins to trigger the tests and we’re able to run the tests without a real screen.

Ranorex are very polite to their customers.

Their support is always there for you. Even when we were using the trial they gave support while creating some tests by remote sessions etc.

The set-up of Ranorex itself was very straightforward. but getting the tests stable on a remote server required a bit of practicing. Also, we had to find a way to run the tests without a real screen and use it with Jenkins but actually in the end it’s not hard to learn this at all.

We implemented it completely by ourselves. The implementation depends a bit on the requirements of the organization I think.

Thanks to Ranorex we were already able to find some bugs we wouldn’t find by our manual tests. It helps us to discover bugs in parts of the software we’re currently not focused on.

The pricing for this product is OK, it might not be cheap for a small company but extending the licenses is a lot cheaper than buying it the first time.

We compared some solutions like SOAP UI and Selenium but for our use it was clearly that Ranorex was the best option. As Ranorex is based upon C# and the .NET framework and our software is also developed in C#.NET it felt familiar and testers could also get help from developers if required.

Ranorex is a very good product, especially for testing Windows Forms applications but also companies with web applications and mobile applications will be very pleased by the product as it has also perfect UI recognition for these platforms. It’s also easy to learn for non-programming skilled people.

Support is very quick. You can write to them and on the same day, they will respond. This is one of the best features.

The forum is very good as well.

Regarding other features, the solution identifies the elements very well. Creating and editing elements is very good. They offer automation solutions, and it's all in one tool.

The element library is quite nice.

They have some problems with some pages rendering the angular solutions. If there are many queries on the web page, Ranorex will not render the page correctly. I had about 1,000 queries on the page, and the solution was not able to handle it.

It has a lot of features that are enabled by default, which can help you identify the elements, but if the page has too many queries, it will crash. It might be better if these features were not enabled by default. You should be able to choose the ones you need. It seems the solution was not optimized by the developer.

The solution is very stable. The only issue is rendering pages if there are too many queries.

The solution is very easy to scale.

Technical support is very good, I would give them ten out of ten.

The initial setup was easy.

I had a problem almost one week after implementing. From the beginning, you must look at the webinar. If you don't watch the webinar, it will be hard to work with the solution at the beginning. 

The solution offers a free 30-day trial.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend people try the solution. They have a 30-day free trial that an organization could use to test them out.

Make sure to watch the webinar before implementing the solution, even if they are experimenting with automating. It will make everything easy to understand.  Ranorex has a lot of options which you need to understand and to optimize. You can't automate the optimization, which is why the webinar is so important. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.