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Coding — like any other craft — takes many years of practice to master. Having testers program a bunch of codes, fix errors in applications, and finish backlogs in weeks are challenging. According to the World Quality Report 2019–2020, lacking advanced programming expertise is chosen as one of the top challenges when applying test automation to agile projects. That’s where codeless automation testing tools came into place as a response to the challenge.

Simply put, codeless test automation means creating automated tests without the need to physically write codes. It provides testers lacking sophisticated programming skills with project templates for workflow, element libraries, and interface customization.

Furthermore, new innovations have been constantly applied to the testing process, for example, combining AI and Machine Learning into the self-healing mechanism, making the setup more user-friendly and maximizing test reliability. Thus, it helps simplify test automation and solve the coding skill conundrum.

The increasing adoption of codeless automation tools is anticipated to be one of the most influential automation testing trends in 2021.

Katalon Studio is a complete codeless testing solution for Web, API, Mobile, and Desktop applications. Beginners can start with test automation immediately using its user-friendly interface, record, and playback, drag and drop commands. Instead of building a framework from scratch based on libraries, you can get out of the box and have Katalon Studio generate an automation framework for you.

For professional users, the rich set of built-in keywords and dual-scripting interfaces enable them to write advanced test scripts effortlessly. Thus, with Katalon Studio, you are able to extend testing capabilities, reuse in other projects, and enhance your team collaboration.

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Determined by more than 600 positive reviews as one of the 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choices for Software Test Automation, Katalon Studio positions themselves at the top of the codeless testing market. Moreover, now you can get their free resource about Test Automation on Katalon Academy.

Website: https://www.katalon.com

Pricing: Free — $869/year

Perfecto Scriptless (formerly TestCraft) is an end-to-end automation testing platform for regression and continuous testing. Like any other codeless testing tool, the record-and-playback tool provides a test script with inputs coded beforehand that need to be customized later.

Tweaking some codes may break the test script. Thus, “Smart binding” in TestCraft refers to the smart element locators that can immediately capture various attributes such as IDs, position, text value, or size. They can even rebound during a run to match changes in the code. Since TestCraft merged with Perfecto, you can try out the highlight feature from both.

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Website: https://www.perfecto.io/products/scriptless

Pricing: Commercial — Contact sales.

Perfecto is a cloud-based test automation tool for web-based and mobile applications, offering comprehensive AI analytics with error classifications to optimize the CI/CD pipeline. It also provides multiple supported devices, browsers, and OS combinations for mobile and web app testing. Within Perfecto, robust and AI-driven bindings account for 97.4% of app changes. One of them is the self-healing feature that enables test scripts to continuously run without any disruptions or maintenance required.

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Website: https://www.perfecto.io/

Pricing: From $1,500/year.

CloudQA is a powerful cloud-based integrated codeless test automation platform designed to build, maintain, and execute tests against many browsers in parallel.

CloudQA gives you the equivalent power of Selenium without the sophisticated programming skills required. Recorded tests are put into maintainable modules and visualized into easily comprehensible forms. Even similar tests can be reused for regression testing, load testing, and synthetic monitoring.

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Website: https://cloudqa.io/

Pricing: From $3,588/year

Sikuli is a Python-based GUI test automation solution that can automate anything on the screen that has native GUI components such as toolbars, Windows dialogs, dialogue boxes, and Linux programs.

Moreover, the productive IDE in Sikuli plays as an editor in your visual scripting API to control screenshots and test the computer vision commands. However, compared to other codeless tools, Sikuli requires you to install the Java runtime as an extra plugin.

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Website: http://sikuli.org/

Pricing: Open-source

Mabl is a unified DevTestOps platform that makes it easy for both developers and non-developers to generate and execute automated functional UI tests faster and at scale.

Mabl can maximize the potential of your data, from user experience, visual design, to performance testing by running robust tests in minutes across all major browsers, in parallel and in the cloud without disrupting operations. Plus, reusable flows can modularize and re-add several if conditions to configure multiple data sets to run the same tests on and run simultaneously.

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Website: https://www.mabl.com/

Pricing: Contact sales.

Applitools automatically validates performance testing and user experience testing of your applications and websites in minutes. It covers all application platforms (Web, Mobile, and Desktop), test automation frameworks, and programming languages (Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, Ruby).

Since the new launch of Applitools Visual Grid, Applitools Servers receive DOM snapshots and analyze in parallel 30 times faster than the previous snapshot images (see Applitools testing framework).

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Website: https://applitools.com/

Pricing: Contact sales

Usetrace is a codeless automation testing tool that tirelessly automates cloud-based computers to test your applications and websites. These computers automatically repeat the traces of customers’ usage using record and playback, drag and drop interface — real-time on most used browsers.

Having Usetrace write all test scripts, your team can keep pace with the application from the dashboard, including how it is working in different browsers by diving into many traces.

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Website: https://usetrace.com/

Pricing: From $2,000/year

Leapwork is an easy-to-use codeless test automation tool with a user-friendly interface and advanced capabilities. Like any other codeless testing tool, within a few clicks, you can easily design automated test cases using the default library and predefined building blocks.

Leapwork even allows you to flexibly run tests on both local and distant environments by customizing run schedules. If any performance errors occur, Leapwork will automatically alert you in SMS. You can check live dashboards and insightful reports for better changes.

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Website: https://www.leapwork.com/

Pricing: Contact sales.

With the latest version of Ranorex 9.3 released, Ranorex is one of the best renowned GUI test automation frameworks for desktop, web-based, and mobile (native and WAP apps) testing. An impressive point of Ranorex is that its UI test execution reports are exported during test execution to reproduce bugs and maintain tests, thus reducing time to find out what and where things failed. They also comprise screenshots of those failed test cases.

Ranorex can be integrated with many technologies such as Silverlight, .NET, Winforms, Java, HTML5, Windows apps, iOS, and Android, to name but a few. However, it does not support macOS, Android web-based, and hybrid testing applications.

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Website: https://www.ranorex.com/

Pricing: From $3,400/year

A codeless automation tool that targeted the extent of automation coverage & productivity by Keyword-Driven Testing. Test Architect really easy-to-use and scalable framework for Selenium. With features such as Intuitive IDE, Intelligent Out-of-the-Box Action Library, Interface Viewer, Multivariate Test Execution, Test Architect has become a friendly tool you should try.

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Website: https://www.testarchitect.com/

Pricing: Contact Sale

In summary, seeking the perfect codeless testing tool is still difficult among a handful of choices. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of each solution as well as your requirements, you can narrow your shortlist down based on your project status and team members’ capabilities.

All factors combined, the future of codeless automation testing tools is approaching at an exponential rate. They significantly relieve QA testers from the burden of mastering complex testing frameworks or technologies to automate tests fluently. The adoption of AI/ML takes these tools to a higher level with flexibility in changing codes, reducing flakiness, improving maintainability, and constant updates.

However, codeless doesn’t mean 100% codeless. Even though scripts are automatically created in the background, automation testers are required to have the basic coding knowledge to further customize their scripts.

What’s waiting for codeless test automation tools in 2021? Some QA professionals are viewing codeless as a preferred solution to embed into their existing DevOps cycle. Codeless testing tools would not replace automation testers completely, but shorten the pace of their jobs. The importance of codeless tools is expected to progress in 2021 and become the complementary piece of the automation testing puzzle.

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