Hello ,
I am currently deciding between WinAppDriver or Ranorex to build a test automation suite for a complex desktop app which has a fair share of winforms and WPF elements. The company I am with already has a license for Ranorex and some tests built with it.
However, WinAppDriver is a Microsoft backed product which is expected to grow in the future and offers Selenium like functionality. It comes with its own challenges though, i.e. building a custom framework and less support as compared to Ranorex.
The focus in my organisation is speed and getting the test suite up as soon as possible.
Any experts who can help me decide between Ranorex and WinAppDriver?
I’ve been using winappdriver for about a year now. Progress on the development of WAD has been haulted for some time as the developers working on the product left microsoft, there has been some recent communications about it being picked back up again but who knows. For what I use it for now, my alternative was codedui, which is terrible in my opinion and WAD is much easier to use, especially if you have selenium background.
WAD has its own drawbacks, it is quite slow on tables and grids, or lots of data, little support, overflowing issues in the github, but there is at least a community out there to reach out to. Many of the solutions from selenium can be utilized in WAD as well, which is nice.
I’ve never used ranorex, so its hard for me to judge. But I’ve built out a distributed automation system using azure and WAD that seems to be going well, and other teams in my company are now transitioning to this as their uplift from codedUI.
Let me k now if there are any other questions — oh yeah, one nice thing about WAD is .. its free! hopefully open sourced in the future if microsoft does not want to invest in it.