What needs improvement with ReadyAPI?

The vendor conducts webinars. They must do it more, though. The solution must update SmartBear Academy. The content on ReadyAPI in SmartBear Academy is outdated.

There is room for improvement in ReadyAPI, particularly in the user interface. I prefer working with multiple windows or tabs, like in SoapUI, rather than the current single-window setup. It becomes challenging to switch between tasks seamlessly.

The reporting in ReadyAPI could be better. It can become sloppy, sometimes it works and other times it does not.

I would ideally like to see a more user-friendly UI to replace what is currently there. Secondly, we never know when there's going to be a license upgrade and it would be helpful to receive an automated email prior to license expiry or some kind of auto-enabled system for license upgrades to give us an alert or some kind of notification before the license expires.

This solution is a pro version of SoapUI, which is a licensed version. There is a free version of SoapU but this requires coding and knowledge of groovy scripting. The overall scope of this solution is limited and could be improved.

Many users will consider this solution expensive compared to the layout. It is more expensive than other solutions.

ReadyAPI can improve because it is limited to only SOAP and REST services. They should update the solution to include more protocols so that other people are not limited to SOAP and REST services. Other than would be able to utilize it. We should be given control over some of the customization of the reports, such as what things are to be included, and what are not to be included.

There is a lot of room for improvement, mainly from the point of view of integrating ReadyAPI into the CI pipelines, and also the scripting aspect into Bitbucket. ReadyAPI is an extremely good and efficient standalone tool, but if you're collaborating on a project, it kind of becomes like a bottleneck. For use as a tool for group collaboration, there is some room for improvement. I would like to see two new features. Number one is version control with Bitbucket or Git, where we can actually see the scripts and have meaningful pull requests. Right now, everything sits inside an XML file, so it's very hard to review the code that anybody writes. If I have a ReadyAPI project, I want to not only have it on my local machine, but also in a version control system like Git or Bitbucket. At this time I can put the project there, but it's very hard to decipher the files that ReadyAPI exposes. It would be nice for them to have it more like a .gui file where the formatting of the file and the readability of the code is easier for other individuals. Second, is integration into a continuous integration pipeline, like a CI pipeline, where we can easily trigger, via Bamboo or Jenkins, and execute the scripts and maybe get the response of the results via an email or notification. Maybe it also needs integration into tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack, to get immediate feedback about the results of our execution. Those would be the new improvements I would like to see in their upcoming versions.

We have an older version of ReadyAPI and it's not supporting our whole tests, so we have had to migrate some or we've had difficulties running them because they're very old script. Better compatibility or more support for the older versions would be helpful. Also, I've been seeing the same UI for many years, since I was using the free version, and the paid version looks the same. I think the UI could be a little bit better.

From my side, it is mainly licensing because some of my clients already considered it, but later on, they refused to obtain the license because they thought it was too costly. It was too expensive for them because each user needs to be licensed, and there are different licenses within the product. So, licensing was an issue for them. The support could also be improved to handle requests more quickly. Sometimes the support takes long, even for serious bugs.

An improvement for ReadyAPI would be automated import/export with third-party tools. It can also be hard for new testers to learn.

To generate a test suite in API, I had to create a separate one each time because otherwise it would just override the test. Each API had to be added separately. I thought I could just have one and then create different methods, but I had to add each API separately to create the test for that. That is an area that could be improved. It would be nice to have some kind of automation or organization.

Version control does not work well. It's has a git API which is defective and doesn't work well with our version repository, Bitbucket. We do all version control using git bash (command line driven), and sometimes we have to try several times to as there still hooks into the ReadyAPI git API which cause issues.

It doesn't have connectors to the NoSQL database. This is one of the things where they do not have a very solid strategy today. Other solutions have an in-built mechanism where I can directly and easily connect. An API is more around a user submitting a request on the frontend. It then hits the backend, puts the data, and responds back. If I am hitting MongoDB or NoSQL databases, I do not have ready-made inbuilt solutions in ReadyAPI that can easily help me in automating it faster. In our organization, we deal with NoSQL databases, and therefore, we need Groovy. We just cannot have a connector from ReadyAPI to do that. I have to write Groovy scripts. If you have themes that are predominantly using MongoDB, it leads to more maintenance and support activity because we are introducing more code into our commission. In terms of additional features, it can have cloud support. This is one of the things where we are getting into cloud support. We'll see how it works, but it is one of the doubts that we still have.

The reporting is not very robust and needs to be improved. They give the pass or fail criteria, but we need to know the history and also why it has failed. Essentially, the details that we see in other tools are missing. This is a request that we have made and we hope that these are implemented in the next version. They should include support for integrating with Xray, which is another test management tool. More generally, they should have a larger scope when it comes to integrating with test management tools.

I think the security testing with API could be improved as they provide limited templates. It would be helpful if they provided us with more capabilities and the flexibility of adding more custom verification for the security testing part of ReadyAPI. Basically, some additional features would improve the product.

The performance in some cases needs improvement. Sometimes it requires too many resources.

We stopped using this solution because of issues with scalability. Performance and memory management both need to be improved because other solutions use less memory for the same amount of data. I think that there was an open-source version, with a lower cost, then this would be a recipe to get into bigger markets.

This solution is focused on web services, but it should be expanded to a complete test manager. For example, in the test suite, you can include a UI test, but this is with another tool. It is not fully integrated. ReadyAPI is not fully integrated with all system ecosystem tests. If ReadyAPI had more integration with all of the big tools on the market then this would be very useful.

I would like to see a better dashboard for monitoring in the next release of this solution. The reporting needs to be improved.