Fortra's Automate (formerly HelpSystems Automate) is a robotic process automation platform for desktop applications. According to the vendor, it offers the ability to automate almost any business process, and no technical expertise is required—IT and business users alike can understand the drag-and-drop interface.
1. It's open source which supports range of languages, operating systems and languages. Well suited for Android and IOS mobile automation. Supports all kinds of apps, which makes it flexible and robust mobile testing tool 2. It is less appropriate where we need intercept network call to verify the API calls. Extensive coding experience is required to work Appium
It's great for repetitive or regularly scheduled activities like reports or file transfers. However, it's not so good for on-demand activities. It doesn't support task shortcuts to run specific tasks. If it did it would be perfect.
I would like to give 9/10 rating to Appium because of it can easily integrate with popular frameworks and CI/CD tools, as well as it is reliable, flexible and easy to use. The setup can bit complex in initial step, but once on configured it's very easy to use and enables stable and scalable mobile automation for real and cloud devices.
If you're an Apple developer, you use Xcode. It's practically a forced necessity. For system testing though, it doesn't have to be. You can have your development team focus on unit and integration tests in their platform and another team automate acceptance tests with a language they are more familiar with.
It's been a net positive as AutoMate requires less eyes on specific tasks so that people can focus attention elsewhere and do more analysis.
Less manual work also decreases the chances of mistakes and/or missed jobs. Since Automate can schedule everything, send email notifications, etc., there is less time wasted.