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Automation Anywhere vs Selenium HQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
522
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (3rd), Process Mining (1st)
Selenium HQ
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (4th), Regression Testing Tools (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nelson F. Guerrero - PeerSpot reviewer
Saved us half a million dollars and 10,000 hours in the first year
There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved. Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours. The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty. The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now. The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done. Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it. Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved. They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly. The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.
LokeshYadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use with great pricing and lots of documentation
I've also worked with Micro Focus. I'm working with Micro Focus, however, for that part, I'm working on the mainframe - although I've done some web testing using Micro Focus on a website. Otherwise, I found Selenium to be easier, and simpler to use than Micro Focus when it comes to the web. A lot of support online is available. A lot of forums, and communities are there. For Micro Focus, the part where you identify objects on a webpage, that part is pretty simple on Selenium. You can use XPath or CSS or IDE or anything, and it works fine. Yet with Micro Focus, the web part, I found it a little tedious to work with. Selenium is much easier in that sense on the web part.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Automation Anywhere is easy to use and user-friendly due to its intuitive interface and straightforward implementation architecture, making it accessible even for those without a technical background."
"The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI."
"In our fund management and fund reconciliation process, we had a lot of headcount. Automation has significantly reduced our FTE count, investing that IT personnel into other work. Also, the quality of the work has slightly improved."
"There are quite a few very strong features available to users."
"With Automation Anywhere, what used to take us two days now takes us twenty minutes."
"Automation Anywhere includes IQ Bots. So, IQ Bots is the key part of Automation Anywhere. You can work on any type of PDF, images, invoices, or billing things in any company. You can just upload it and extract the data, then use it as you require. It is a key part of Automation Anywhere: the best part."
"We've had many sit-down conversations with the Automation Anywhere team when we were testing out the document automation. We gave them feedback about potential enhancements, so when we launched our most recent document automation use case, the capabilities were already there. We didn't need to come up with a workaround or put the project on hold because the things we needed were unavailable. That commitment to customer success stands out because they know that without us, the product won't succeed."
"When our organization switched to Automation Anywhere, the accuracy rate improved and consequently, there has not been much data loss."
"The most valuable feature of Selenium HQ is the ability to create automatic tests that can replicate human behavior."
"It supports most of the mainstream browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, IE and etc."
"Selenium HQ's most valuable feature is its online community support, which is comprehensive and easy to access."
"What I like about Selenium HQ is that we wrote it ourselves. I think it's perfect. It's a framework that you can use to devise your own products, which is nice."
"It is more stable in comparison to other solutions because they have quite some experience in the market."
"I am impressed with the product's ability to catch content from website."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"It has helped to complete tests in less time, which would not be possible relying on manual testing only."
 

Cons

"They should make the product smarter. The bot we use right now is kind of fundamentally basic loop-based. We really want to see a little bit more advanced capability, that way we can undertake more comprehensive tasks."
"We had initial hiccups, like any new process. It took us six to eight months to sort the product out."
"I would like more with OCR and data capture. We are partnering with IBM to help bridge this gap, but Automation Anywhere should continue to expand on their product line and provide these capabilities, as well."
"We have our limitations. We can run only VBScripts and one more thing. If we want to run Python scripts or batch files, we cannot do it. So, if they would add these extra things in there then that would be beneficial."
"The vendor should increase the training and other engagements with users before they acquire the platform, as this will simplify its usage further and ensure that there no hindrances in using the platform."
"The inclusion of word packages would help us to extract data from Word and automate word-related activities easily."
"Especially while using v11, I often experience freezes with OCR extraction from PDF files."
"They will need much more support, because it is a new thing and it’ll never fail because of productive partners. It will fail if people on the “gemba” don’t adopt it."
"Selenium has room for improvement as it does not support the tests and result-sharing in anything but a manual way."
"Shadow DOM could be improved and the handling of single page applications. Right now, it's a bit complicated and there are a lot of additional scripts required if you want to handle a single page application in a neat way."
"Selenium HQ could have better interaction with SAP products."
"Katalon has built a UI on top of Selenium to make it more user-friendly, as well as repository options and the ability to create repositories for objects, among other things. It would be helpful if this type of information could be included in the Selenium tool itself, so people wouldn't have to do filing testing."
"In the beginning, we had issues with several test cases failing during regression. Over a period of time, we built our own framework around Selenium which helped us overcome of these issues."
"There should be standardized frameworks to build automation."
"Selenium HQ can improve by creating an enterprise version where it can provide the infrastructure for running the tests. Currently, we need to run the test in our infrastructure because it's a free tool. If Google can start an enterprise subscription and they can provide us with the infrastructure, such as Google Cloud infrastructure where we can configure it, and we can run the test there, it would be highly beneficial."
"I would like to see automatic logs generated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's cheaper than other similar solutions."
"In terms of pricing, this is a good product."
"Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. It has to be completely dedicated. Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too."
"Automation Anywhere is competitive... Pega is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running."
"Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions."
"The price is a little bit high but the support is good."
"I've seen the price vary by whether the client is going to scale and adopt a tool."
"In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs."
"It's open-source, so it's free."
"It is an open-source tool."
"It is all free."
"Since it is an open source. It is free to use. However my company see it as the future of load testing."
"It is an open-source solution."
"The solution is open source."
"Selenium is an open-source solution, and It's free."
"Selenium is a free tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is very good in certain situations but lacks in others. For me, it's more the team tha...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applications that AA has limitations for, such as the Oracle. For web-based applicatio...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
How do I choose between Selenium HQ and Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence?
Selenium HQ’s biggest advantage is that it is customizable. Its other most valuable feature is that the driver interface is really helpful and user-friendly; Selenium HQ makes it easy to navigate t...
What do you like most about Selenium HQ?
Selenium's open-source nature is a key advantage. Its extensive support for diverse web technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Selenium HQ?
As an open-source tool, Selenium does not have direct costs, but coding can be money-intensive because it is challenging.
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
SeleniumHQ
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, experitest, Tricentis GmbH, SmartBear Software
Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere vs. Selenium HQ and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.