Fortra’s Automate vs. Selenium

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Fortra’s Automate
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Selenium
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Selenium is open source software for browser automation, primarily used for functional, load, or performance testing of applications.N/A
Pricing
Fortra’s AutomateSelenium
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fortra’s AutomateSelenium
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
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Fortra’s AutomateSelenium
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User Ratings
Fortra’s AutomateSelenium
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(4 ratings)
9.2
(55 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(6 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(11 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Fortra’s AutomateSelenium
Likelihood to Recommend
Fortra
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.
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Open Source
When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.
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Pros
Fortra
  • Very detailed task builder. Easy to read step by step a task's operation even if you don't have much programming knowledge.
  • Scheduling for automation jobs is very flexible. Allows us to create all kinds of job schedules as needed.
  • Organization of jobs, tasks, conditions is done well. Allows us to easily manage our items.
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Open Source
  • For any web based UI automation, Selenium is the best tool out there to automate your tests.
  • It supports multiple coding languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C# etc.. to choose from.
  • There is a huge community of users and can get many answers on StackOverFlow.
  • It has lot of other plugins to make your tests even more efficient.
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Cons
Fortra
  • A reporting capability on tasks: enabled, disabled, by folder, by trigger, etc. Currently there is none.
  • An "OR" in their conditional statements - currently there is only "AND".
  • Some kind of temporary backup when changing a task - separate from the current back up/restore functionality (which works well).
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Open Source
  • Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
  • Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
  • Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.
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Likelihood to Renew
Fortra
No answers on this topic
Open Source
We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.
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Usability
Fortra
It's just very easy to use, extremely versatile, and very reliable. It's hard to find use cases where it won't work.
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Open Source
As I mentioned earlier, the reason I use Selenium is because there is a fairly widespread community of users, and user support services are at a good level. because the application is open source, it works on many platforms (Windows, Linux, IOS) without any problems. In addition, it gives us a lot of options for writing functional tests. For errors that we receive through the application, we can easily find the reasons for errors in the forums.
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Support Rating
Fortra
Support is very helpful and responsive, although using the tool is very user-friendly, so I hardly use the service.
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Open Source
Selenium does not have technical support available easily. You have to go through forums to get the information you need. However, there are excellent forums out there that make it easy to troubleshoot. The open-source flexibility makes it difficult to have dedicated support.
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Implementation Rating
Fortra
No answers on this topic
Open Source
We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.
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Alternatives Considered
Fortra
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Open Source
At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.
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Return on Investment
Fortra
  • 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.
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Open Source
  • There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
  • This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
  • We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
  • We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium
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ScreenShots

Fortra’s Automate Screenshots

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