We are in an era of automation. The ever-increasing work pace is urging automation tools that are developed for making our work routines easy and efficient. For this purpose, we conclude a list of the 30 highest-rated process automation tools in the areas of automation software testing, web scraping, and robotic process automation.
10 Tools for Automation Software Testing
1. Selenium
License: Open-source
Selenium is one of the most popular open-source testing frameworks for various web applications and platforms like Windows, Mac, and Linux. As an automation framework of choice for web automation testers, especially those with advanced programming and scripting skills, its scripts can be written in different programming languages like Java, PHP, Python, C#, Groovy, Ruby, and Perl. With great flexibility and various levels of complexity for testers, Selenium is undoubtedly the base for most of the other testing tools in general.
2. Watir
License: Open-source
Watir is an open-source Ruby library and C#-developed web application testing tool for web automation tests. Watir supports cross-browser testing including Firefox, Opera, headless browser, and IE. It supports HTML and AJAX website testing, page, and control models. Watir also supports data-driven testing and integrates with BBD tools like RSpec, Cucumber, and Test/Unit.
3. Protractor
License: Open-source
Protractor is an open-source functional automation framework (also known as an End-to-End testing framework) specially designed to verify the health of AngularJS web applications. It is a Node.js program that supports test frameworks like Jasmine, Mocha, and Cucumber. It uses Selenium WebDriver to drive browsers and simulate users’ interaction with an AngularJS application running in a browser. Protractor’s automatic waiting can automatically execute the next step in your test the moment the webpage finishes pending tasks.
4. Robot Framework
License: Open-source
Robot Framework is an open-source automation framework that implements the keyword-driven approach for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Robot Framework is an application-independent operating system. The core framework is implemented using Python and runs also on Jython (JVM) and IronPython (.NET). Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.
5. Katalon Studio
License: Free
Katalon Studio is a powerful integrated test automation solution for web applications, mobile, and web services. It also supports different browsers/devices like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Android, and iOS. Unlike Selenium, it supports different levels of testing skill sets, and even non-programmers can start an automation testing project easily. Katalon Studio can also be integrated into CI/CD processes and works well with other popular tools including qTest, Jira, Git, and Jenkins. Its nice feature called Katalon Analytics provides users with test execution reports including metrics, charts, and graphs.
6. Unified Functional Testing (UFT)
License: Commercial
Unified Functional Testing (UFT) is a popular commercial testing tool for functional and regression testing. It offers a comprehensive feature set for API, web services, and GUI testing of web, desktop, and mobile applications across platforms. It has advanced image-based object recognition features, error-handling mechanisms, automated documentation, and reusable test components. Visual Basic Scripting Edition is used by UFT to register the testing process and object control. It is integrated with Mercury Business Process Testing and Mercury Quality Center.
7. TestComplete
License: Commercial
TestComplete is a powerful commercial testing tool for web, mobile, and desktop testing. TestComplete supports multiple scripting languages including JavaScript, Python, VBScript, JScript, DelphiScript, C++Script, and C#Script. Its automated UI testing uses the script-free record and replays feature to easily create automated UI tests. TestComplete allows testers to perform keyword-driven and data-driven testing. It also integrates with Jenkins in a CI process.
8. Tricentis Tosca
License: Commercial
Tricentis Tosca is a model-based test automation tool that provides quite a broad feature set for continuous testing including dashboards, analytics, and integrations to support agile and DevOps methodologies. Like other automation testing software, it supports a wide range of technologies and applications such as web, mobile, and API. Tricentis Tosca also provides out-of-the-box integration with popular tools such as Jenkins, Jira, GitHub, Docker, Puppet, Visual Studio, etc. The other capabilities include risk coverage and integration management.
9. Ranorex
License: Commercial
Ranorex is a quite comprehensive commercial automation tool for web, mobile, and desktop testing. The tool features advanced capabilities for GUI recognition, reusable test scripts, bug detection, and record/playback. Codeless test creation is also a very useful feature that allows new automation testers to learn and apply test automation to their projects. The tool supports Selenium integration for web application testing. Testers can distribute the execution of their tests across platforms and browsers using Selenium Grid.
10. Telerik TestStudio
License: Commercial
Telerik TestStudio offers one solution to automate desktop, web, and mobile application testing including UI, load, and performance testing. It supports different programming languages including JavaScript, Silverlight, WPF, MVC, AJAX, HTML, and ASP.NET. Telerik TestStudio features advanced capabilities for cross-browser testing, manual testing, bug-tracking tools, and record/playback.
4 Best Web Scraping Tools
11. Octoparse
License: Free
Octoparse is a free, easy-to-use yet powerful web scraper that can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, Captcha and etc without any coding. It provides users with some useful, easy-to-use built-in tools to extract data from tough or aggressive websites that are difficult to scrape. It could extract all the information that is visible online as well as those hidden content that can be found in the source code. Like a web scraper, you can also easily export data in CSV format or store it in databases (SqlServer, MySql, Oracle). What’s more, the Cloud services enable you to bulk extract huge amounts of data within a short time by many cloud servers and you can get the data via Octoparse API.
12. Scrapy
License: Open-source
Scrapy is a free and open-source web crawling framework for extracting data from websites, written in Python. Originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using APIs or as a general-purpose web crawler. Scrapy also provides a web crawling shell that can be used by developers to test their assumptions on a site’s behavior.
13. WebScraper (Chrome)
License: Free
Web Scraper is an easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from the online table into clean data. Web Scraper could extract data from dynamic web pages. It uses sitemaps that will navigate the site and extract multiple types of data – text, tables, images, links, and more. It could also extract data that is loaded or generated dynamically with JavaScript, including scrolling down the page, clicking on pagination buttons that loaded data via AJAX, and clicking on buttons to load more data. And you can easily export data in CSV format or store it in CouchDB.
14. Outwit Hub
License: Free
Outwit Hub is a Firefox extension that can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, it gives web scraping capabilities to your browser. Out of the box, it has data point recognition features that make your scraping job easier. Extracting data from sites using Outwit Hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The setup is fairly easy to learn. You can refer to the guides on using Outwit Hub to get started with web scraping. Because it is free of cost, it is a great option if you need to scrape some data from the web quickly.
15 Robotic Process Automation Tools
15. UiPath
License: Free
UiPath is a free, fully-featured, and extensible Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool for automating any web or desktop application. It enables global enterprises to design, deploy and control a full-fledged robotic workforce that mimics employees in administering rules-based tasks and frees them from the daily routine of rote work. It provides change management, deployment management, access control, process modeling, remote execution and scheduling, execution monitoring, auditing and analytics in full compliance with enterprise security and governance best practices. It has a very user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow which requires little knowledge of.Net for a few scenarios.
16. Syntel
License: Commercial
Syntel employs the latest Agile and DevOps methodologies to help speed up customers’ application development process. It helps to implement a factory-based development model and enables customers to leverage a variety of cloud platforms to develop and test their applications. It provides a product engineering center of excellence, agile powered by automated DevOps to accelerate the delivery, and implementation of industry-leading cloud solutions like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Salesforce, and Docker. It develops an automation-powered model for every platform and integrates quality engineering.
17. Blue Prism
Blue Prism is built on the established and proven Microsoft .NET Framework. It automates all applications and supports all platforms (mainframe, Windows, WPF, Java, web, etc.) presented in a variety of ways (terminal emulator, thick client, thin client, web browser, Citrix, and web services). And it provides a single capability for automating all of the applications used within an organization. Designed for a multi-environment deployment model (Development, Test, Staging, and Production) with both physical and logical access controls, Blue Prism includes a centralized release management interface and process change distribution model providing high levels of visibility and control. Additional control is provided to the business via a centralized model for process development and reuse.
18. Softomotive
License: Commercial
Softomotive is a popular provider of Robotic Process Automation products and services. It provides a ProcessRobot solution, which empowers enterprises to dramatically reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, improve productivity, and accelerate performance. It could organize structured workflows and enjoy better data quality eliminating human error and focusing on higher priority, value-added initiatives. It works around the clock 24/7/365, nights and weekends, allowing for the immediate turnaround for requests, above and beyond customer expectations.
19. WorkFusion
License: Commercial
WorkFusion is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) crowd computing platform that uses crowdsourced workers to teach algorithms to automate a wide variety of knowledge work, particularly in the financial services, eCommerce, and retail industries. WorkFusion automates the monitoring of data feed and sources, and trains and manages crowd-sourced workers from global talent markets to structure and validate announcements. It uses statistical quality control (SQC) to ensure the accuracy of the work output. It is the complete automation solution for global operations, combining into one platform the core capabilities you need to digitize complex business processes: business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), workforce orchestration, and machine learning-powered cognitive automation.
20. Automation Anywhere
License: Commercial
Automation Anywhere is a way more developer-friendly tool with decent sociability to handle huge volumes. It offers both front-office and back-office robots. It is more script-based, while UI and BP have visual process designers. This means you need to have better programming skills to use AA. It has a really smart recorder option which is not present in Blue Prism. UI element identification works well in both AA and Blue Prism, but seems more robust in Blue Prism, as it considers multiple factors apart from XY coordinates. Automation Anywhere robots can be deployed on both physically attended machines and the cloud.
21. NICE
License: Commercial
NICE automates manual desktop tasks that are highly structured, routine, and rules- schedule- or event-driven, requiring little (if any) analysis or subjective judgment. The average back office employee, for example, spends 80% of their day on such activities, as filling in forms, making repetitive calculations, or processing orders. These tasks may be critical for supporting customers, but for your employees, they are tedious motivation killers. They are also notoriously error-prone and time-consuming. NICE Robotic Automation allows you to hand these processes off to a robotic workforce that is fast, perfectly accurate, tireless, and easily scalable. With NICE Robotic Automation, you can relieve employees of tasks that require no human intervention (“unattended”) and partially automate those that do (“attended”).
22. Jacada
License: Commercial
Jacada’s solutions work with three primary contact methods – a voice inquiry, an online web session, and responding to some sort of outbound communication, to deliver a unique and successful digital self-service experience. Jacada Integration and Automation (“JIA”) provides robust data integration and desktop automation capabilities on your existing Windows and Web applications. Desktop Automation provides process guidance, enhances your existing workflows, and eliminates redundant data entry while simplifying lengthy navigation sequences. Unlike many competing products, JIA steps beyond pure automation and provides integration capabilities. This allows you to expose your existing closed application functionality as open standard web services for reuse in your SOA initiatives. More importantly, all these are accomplished without modification of the applications, without access to their source code, and without an API.
23. Pega
License: Commercial
Pegasystems is the largest, best-known pure-play Robotic Process Automation tool vendor. Its software supports all usage scenarios analyzed in this Magic Quadrant. In the past two years, Pegasystems has ramped up its focus on digital business transformation and mobile application development. Pega unifies architecture based on a powerful business rule management system (BRMS) and a predictive analytics decision management engine. The platform combines process flow definitions, rule processing, data handling, cross-platform UIs, a complete mobile application development platform, BAM, content management, case management, application integration and other functions in one model-based development and runtime architecture that supports structured and unstructured process styles. Pega Express, launched in June 2015, provides a wizard-driven UI for citizen developers for organizations looking for a lighter-weight BPM platform.
24. Infosys
License: Commercial
Infosys is the second-largest Indian IT company. It provides software development, maintenance, and independent validation services to companies in finance, insurance, manufacturing, and other domains. Its key products and services are NIA (next-generation integrated AI platform), Infosys consulting (a global management consulting service), Infosys Information Platform (analytics platform), EdgeVerve Systems which includes Finacle (a global banking platform), Panaya Cloud Suite, and Skava.
25. Redwood Software
License: Commercial
Redwood Software accelerates Digital Process Transformation and eliminates the costs of the remaining manual tasks anywhere in the organization. Redwood’s unique approach enables organizations to automate mission-critical IT and business processes, such as those supporting the financial close, supply chain, and business intelligence (BI) to achieve greater reliability, consistency, and accuracy. Customers can select from multiple deployment options including software, cloud, or appliance. Redwood’s Automated Process Packages (APPs) are preconfigured to streamline your end-to-end processes.
26. WorkFusion
License: Commercial
WorkFusion is the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) crowd computing platform. WorkFusion transforms knowledge work by using machine learning to integrate and manage automation tools, crowdsourced workers, and employees (ACE) on web-based workflows. Over time, WorkFusion’s machine learning automates more repetitive tasks, freeing human workers to focus on higher-value work. WorkFusion helps enterprise customers increase workforce scale, elasticity, productivity, and efficiency and lowers the barrier to innovation.
27. Verint
License: Commercial
Verint Systems is a Melville, New York-based analytics company that sells software and hardware products for customer engagement management, security, surveillance, and business intelligence. Their products are designed to assist clients in data analysis, especially large data sets. Verint’s products include speech analysis software (used to analyze call center recordings) and IP surveillance cameras and “smart” video surveillance analysis software.
28. Epiance
License: Commercial
Epiance is the leading provider of enterprise software that helps companies manage their IT-driven business process transformations successfully. Its products deliver a combination of process automation, knowledge transfer, performance support, and process improvement capabilities that reduce costs, increase productivity and improve business performance.
29. eKnowledge Infotech
License: Commercial
eKnowledge Infotech is a leading provider of Robotic Process Automation training to freshers and experienced professionals in Bangalore and Pune. It provides market-leading training in Pune including Selenium, Webdriver, ETL Testing, QlikView, Tableau, Spotfire, Salesforce, Liferay, Informatica, Splunk, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, each of these automation tools has unique features to offer in addressing the growing challenges of software automation in the years ahead. There are many other process automation tools available in the software industry. Which one do you use? Feel free to contact us.
