Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Automation Anywhere vs SmartBear TestComplete comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
553
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (3rd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (3rd), Agentic Automation (2nd)
SmartBear TestComplete
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (9th), Regression Testing Tools (5th), Test Automation Tools (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

Vatsal Mehta - PeerSpot reviewer
Accommodates diverse use cases and effectively meets customer requirements
AI agents need further improvements. AI agent technology in agentic process automation is still evolving. We have only scratched the surface, and there are many potential use cases yet to be explored. As technology advances, I believe it will enable us to implement more comprehensive automation solutions. Document Automation has issues related to speed. When I compare Document Automation with IQ Bot, IQ Bot is faster than Document Automation. My understanding is that they are still evolving Document Automation, and this issue of slowness will be resolved in the upcoming .35 version, so we are good with that. They are working on signature identification and validations for handwritten documents. Currently, we are able to extract data out of scanned but digital images, but there is still scope for improvement for handwritten documents.
Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for integration automation, user-based automation, and web automation
The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts. The solution has introduced a new feature that helps us identify objects we cannot normally identify. It gives you a fair idea of objects, resolving the object recognition issue. The solution can be used to perform different tests on different machines.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The CyberArk integration and setup are really amazing and it helps us to win deals for new projects."
"It's really easy to use. We have a number of people at our firm who are now certified RPA developers that had no development background. They did that just by the online training in some cases. In some cases, it was the online training, as well as a three day class that we brought in-house and had taught."
"The features like IQ Bot and Metabot have helped our organization to gain business trust and provide a greater number of unique solutions to our clients for complex projects."
"Its ease of use is the most valuable feature. It is easy to train developers and find the right people, then use them to build the tool."
"We needed scalability and the ability to perform 10,000 or 1,000 or 200 tasks at any moment. No other software that we have had could provide such scalability and is built in a modular way."
"Automation Anywhere was easier to learn for the developers. It has a lot of out of box features when it comes to SAP, Excel, and others."
"AA has good coverage in terms of out-of-the-box functionality for bot development and management."
"One of the most valuable features is object cloning, the ability to get into websites and do things faster."
"You can record your actions and play them back later."
"The solution helps improve the stability of our product. It also decreases the work of our manual quality assurance engineers."
"It is very easy to maintain tests with this tool. It covers all necessary items in the test plan. The most painful item in testing is maintenance. When changes occur, the tests should be maintained."
"The solution has a very nice interface."
"In TestComplete, I saw a conformed package of a tool that kept everybody in consistency. The team was able to regenerate further tests without having to manipulate more code because the record feature is great."
"The integration with various tools is important."
"Recording and playback of tests were easier with SmartBear TestComplete...It is a scalable solution."
"It works very fine. It is fast on almost any machine, and it is also very well organized. I like its object mapping and its capability to find and interact with almost everything that exists on Windows."
 

Cons

"Some NLP AI is required to work in combination with RPA, especially for reading unstructured emails."
"The main request I have for Automation Anywhere is to focus more on technical demonstrations."
"There is still a way to go for Automation Anywhere where we can see improvement. Mostly, we want to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now, I can see only this mostly in the IQ Bot where we construct the data from PDFs. I also want to see more features where we can use the artificial intelligence in automating tasks as well."
"Built-in HTML features are lagging in this solution, whereas in UiPath, they are very good."
"I feel the tool has to provide deeper insights for debugging issues, considering both internal and external factors."
"Automation Anywhere says that you can use this tool for any type of application, but there are some for which it is not compatible."
"The price has room for improvement."
"There are some business areas for which this tool is not capable of doing, such as in the areas of graphically-based input."
"The artificial intelligence needs to be improved."
"At times, identifying or locating an element can be somewhat challenging. However, in a recent test update, they introduced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability. This introduction has reduced the challenges to some extent, as we can now utilize OCR if the normal method doesn't work. Nevertheless, there is still significant potential for improvement in TestComplete's ability to identify various object elements. I don't have any specific concerns to mention. I have observed significant improvements in TestComplete over the past few years, especially in its support for highly dynamic object elements used in products like Salesforce Dynamics 365. In earlier versions, there were numerous challenges, but the current version is far superior to its predecessors."
"In SmartBear TestComplete the integration with Jenkins could be easier. Additionally, some of the controls could have better customization options. For example, if a grid is used and it contains multiple controls within it, it can be a checkbox, radio button, or any kind of control, the way the Object Spy is operating currently there is a lot of room for improvement."
"What is currently missing from this solution is better support for mobile testing."
"Increased performance with less memory and CPU usage."
"I didn't use it very heavily. One issue that I found was that there wasn't a quick way or a button to move Visual Basic scripts to TestComplete. We have a lot of such scripts in our organization, and it would be very useful to have some option to easily move these scripts. It is currently possible to convert these scripts to TestComplete, but it is not easy. I have to write some code, but everything is not available immediately."
"Stability issues occurred only when connecting to the SourceSafe. Sometimes, after getting the latest version, the tool hangs and it should be reopened in order to recover."
"The code editor, though following eclipse-style, is still a work in progress and gives a very poorly formatted code once viewed via other editing tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My understanding is that the license cost of Automation Anywhere is more reasonable than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"The cost is high for small-scale businesses but it is fine for medium and large enterprises. Its high licensing cost may affect small-scale businesses. Reducing licensing costs would benefit many users."
"Talk to your manager and try to procure an automation license for training. This will allow you to train people, so you can move to automation."
"Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good."
"The cost is anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000."
"I feel the cost of licensing is very high for the A2019 version."
"It is reasonable, but it can always be a little bit cheaper."
"There is an annual license to use the solution."
"Overall, for us, the cost of the TestComplete platform and the three extra modules is around $8,000."
"The pricing is a little above average — it could be lower."
"It costs a few hundred per year, but I am not sure. It is not at all expensive as compared to other tools."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"This is a pay-per-use service that is not expensive, and cost-efficient if you have a small team."
"The solution is around $1500. Some are perpetual licenses, and some get a yearly report card."
"The license price for a physical machine is cheap, and for virtual machine, it is very expensive."
"SmartBear TestComplete is an expensive tool."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Regression Testing Tools solutions are best for your needs.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
7%
 

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.
What do you like most about SmartBear TestComplete?
TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SmartBear TestComplete?
I don't know much about the pricing, however, I think it's cheaper.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
The recording function, when using Python, could be improved, as it does not work well in recording testing.
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.