Item: ReadyAPI
Rating: 5
Author: David Crawford

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it primarily for REST troubleshooting and authentication testing. It's the only application of its kind available on our locked-down development environment currently. We also use it for SOAP troubleshooting, as a lot of our medical data transfers use this standard.

Pros and Cons

Managing different testing environments through projects.
Makes a clear distinction between REST and SOAP troubleshooting.
There are a lot of options available that support various data standards, some that are more obscure but help the person that needs it.

When you need to just do a quick REST test, it takes too long to get everything setup from a new project.
Adding authentications can be a pain, and if it's basic auth then you have to base64 encode it yourself.
The UI used to be pretty ugly. Their update to it recently seemed to just put a flat look on everything to make it seem modern but didn't actually overhaul much. Buttons still jump around and move/shift when other dynamic areas change during a test that goes through a bunch of calls. Also, they still use child windows to control all the views, which isn't very nice to work with considering no other development application I use does that.

Return on Investment

It's helped troubleshoot REST and SOAP issues, but not speedily. I've often had to turn to other tools instead. It has made projects take longer.

Alternatives Considered

Burp Suite

Just some basic REST clients like RESTlet and HTTP Header Spy work really great and are fast to setup. They work the way I expect. Burp also is a lot more powerful albeit there's a lot more going on than you may need.

Other Software Used

Burp Suite

Likelihood to Recommend

Managing lots of different projects and domains to test is easier with SoapUI, it's not good for doing a quick test on something new or a one-off thing.

Products Replaced

Yes - We were initially using postman, but needed more robust compatibility with Soap messages, which are used a lot in medical data transfers.

We also needed good support for data driven testing, which postman doesn't provide, via tables of known test values against automated API testing. Postman is manual.

We also didn't want to have to build custom XML request messages, which postman needs. SoapUI handles that much better and takes away a lot of tedious work.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability

The product features were the most important to us:

Soap message compatibility
Automated API testing
Data driven testing
Custom XML requests

Because every Hospital almost seems to have their own data standards, it was easy to mock up all the different data structures for testing. And the automated testing was very important because there are thousands and thousands of test cases to run all of the endpoints and "integration interfaces" against in the whole interoperability environment.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I believe we made the right decision based on our specific needs, and I wouldn't change the selection process at its core. There are more competitors every day, however, and postman is still a great tool for its specific purposes. In the future, I would make sure to reevaluate postman and other competitors to see if they include the features I've outlined.

SOAP UI Hasn't Cleaned My Troubleshooting Needs Yet

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with ReadyAPI (formerly SoapUI Pro, LoadUI Pro, & ServiceV Pro)