Ranorex Studio Reviews

We use the solution for screen-based navigation.

The solution has its advantages, as it supports virtual machines. Thus, we can integrate it with the DevOps processes and Jenkins server.

Presently, the solution only supports Windows. It would be good if it also supports Ubuntu, as we have tools running on both systems.

We have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We have seven to eight users in our organization.

The solution's technical support team could be responsive.

The solution's initial setup process is easy and less time-consuming. We have to follow the steps mentioned on its website for installation. It is easy to maintain as well.

The solution is easy to learn. I advise others to understand their business requirements before making the purchase decision. They can also opt for tools like Katalon.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten because of the complexity of C-Sharp language. They should include Python language instead.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

Strong Element capturing feature of Ranorex Spy, Coding in C#/ VB .net, Easy integration with CI Tools like Jenkins, TFS, TeamCity, Supports cross browsers, Tool Stability, Powerful record and playback, Ranorex IDE, Visual Studio IDE Integration.

We have used Ranorex for one of our biggest client to automate Web (Asp .net, Sharepoint and Silverlight applications) & Desktop (Windows and WPF) applications. We had smoke and regression test were running on daily basis on Production environment. Now doing some migration on the existing scripts for CRM support.

Other OS Support, Ranorex Spy performance improvement (Especially for Silverlight controls)

Tests will fail if browser minimised, Parallel Execution Not possible (We could do are some extend if we use DOM method), From my experience, Ranorex Spy is slow when spying on Silverlight controls (ex:- Consider if 500 UI Elements are in an hierarchy & you are trying to spy 470th element)

for more than 5 years

not issues, but difficulties when I try to integrate with tfs

Performance was slow for Silverlight applications

not specific

7 out of 10

8 out of 10

yes, previously I was using an automation tool (build on VB .NET) which did not have capability for automating flash/ Silverlight/ windows applications.

Very simple

in-House

We have automated 15+ internal applications for our client, which reduced much manual effort on regression testing.

no comments

When I try Silverlight automation (5-6 years back) no tools were promising, (Including popular tools in the market), So chosen Ranorex. But now many tools supporting Silver light applications, So better if we do re-evaluation against latest tools in the market

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

• 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.