How can we decide whether we should go with RPA or traditional automation tool for automate application/product?

Question

What are the main points which need to be considered while choosing between RPA and traditional automation tools.

How can we decide whether we should go with RPA or traditional automation tool for automate application/product?

Answer 1

It mainly depends on the programming knowledge of the QA/Automation team in your company.
RPA tools are mainly used in case you can't create and maintain professionally constructed and clearly written automation infrastructure and tests.
Additional reason to use RPA, especially UiPath is when you need to automate desktop based or systems like AS400 that can not be automated with Selenium.

Answer 2

If we are talking about RPA (robotic process automation), it's mostly not about testing, it's about how to replace the human operations with some automation and to save time and money.

RPA tools are usually designed to work with multiple applications/os/platforms, because some business processes require getting the data in one application or system, submitting it to another, etc. It could be the work with web-browsers, some text editors, spreadsheets.

RPA tools are usually able to recognize text from images or have speech recognition, they able to make some decisions using Artificial Intelligence, they are complicated and tremendous, usually special trained teams just automate the business process by request and perform all integrations and setup, so it's not easy to use for non-experienced people, I mean experienced in some specific RPA tool, not just in programming.

So, if you really need to do something RPA tools aimed to solve (multiple apps interaction, text/speech recognition, decision making) I suggest using some RPA tools instead of using test automation tools.

If you going just to test some application, or automate some simple steps - using the traditional test automation tools is a more lightweight and simple way to do this.

RPA could be an over-featured tool and introduce complexity.

Answer 3

Selenium is primarily used for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.

But incase your testing involves opening any windows based desktop application you may additionally require winappdriver

Where as using UiPath you can interact simultanously with both kind of elements, either be it a Web Browser based element or a Desktop based Application element as UiPath can interact with both with equal efficiency.

Answer 4

Does your application have an API and the endpoints you require?

If yes, choose a tool like Zapier or Make lots of great tutorials available. Webhooks make most things pretty easy.

If the answer is no, RPA is the way. AA, UI Path, and Robocorp are powerful platforms, or you could try a no-code RPA tool like Axiom.ai

Answer 5

1. Platform.RPA generally focuses on Windows.

2. Desktop application or Web browser? Test tools like Selenium are more powerful for web browser. But if you want to automate desktop applications, RPA would be a better choice.

3. Orchestration. RPA provides more features about Orchestration. You can easily control regular runs, retry, etc.

4. RPA like UIpath is Paid application. Testing tools have more free and open source choices.

5. You can consider and try Clicknium which can automate both web browser and desktop applications. It's something between testing tools and RPA. But, it also lacks of Orchestration.

Answer 6

It realistically comes down to the process that requires the automation.

If it's a heavily UI based application that is used in the process then RPA is the obvious choice; even if it's API based there may be some additional steps that require a Human-in-the-loop validation.

UiPath now has a pretty good Test Suite so it can be used for testing now too in most scenarios.

I would also personally recommend the RPA route when there are multiple applications that need to interact when APIs are not available on all of them.

There is then the debate for which framework to use whether it be UiPath, AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism etc; so just make sure you do your research before picking a framework.