I’ve been using Eggplant for more than 3 years now and I’m very satisfied. But my team is thinking about expanding automation and seeing if there are any cheaper tools. What are the advantages of Eggplant over any other image recognition testing tools? Especially Sikuli! Please list as much as you can, it’s easier to convience someone with a longer list. )
Hi Jason–
Sikuli is very limited in what it can do.
First, it resides on the system you’re testing, meaning you violate the sanctity of the application you are testing.
Second, it only has one method of searching the screen, we have 5; plus those have many parameters that can be adjusted to tailor it to your application’s specific needs.
Third, if you look at the list of commands, it’s very limited. SenseTalk is a much more powerful scripting engine, and has hundreds of built in functions.
Next, it has no real reporting, nor any way to work with those reports from a script.
Lastly, it doesn’t let you control multiple machines from a single script… you have to copy that script to each machine in order to run it instead of having one central controller that goes through and tests each system you need tested.
I hope this helps. Please feel free to contact sales@testplant.com and they can help you argue your case.
Allen
That helps! Thanks! Please let me know if you can think of anything else.
Another point worth mentioning is that Eggplant is specifically designed as a testing tool. This is particularly evident in the Results and Schedules areas, but goes much deeper, too, with things like the logging commands, the RunWithNewResults command, and the CaptureScreen and SendMail commands (not to mention the ability to record movies – currently on the Mac version only).
Eggplant also provides a lot of control over many aspects of how your scripts operate. This helps you deal with the trickier situations that inevitably arise. Simple automation is great when it works, but there will always come a time when you need more control over the finer details like how long the script spends searching for an image (the ImageSearchTime), or limiting the search to a particular area of the screen (the SearchRectangle), or you need to drag something more slowly in order for the application to register that the mouse has rolled over it (the MouseDragSpeed). Or you may need to find all of the instances of something on the screen (EveryImageLocation). Even something as basic as finding out where something is on the screen (ImageLocation) is of no real importance in a simple automation tool but may be of critical importance to a tester.
We’ve been developing and enhancing Eggplant since 2002, with a clear focus on software testing the entire time. With feedback from our customers we’ve been able to improve it (and will continue to!) in ways that make it as useful as possible for your needs as testers. So keep the questions and suggestions coming! We always appreciate hearing from our users about what works and what could be made better.
what are the 5 different ways of searching the screen in Eggplant?
I also heard people are using Sikuli and they love it. Our team is trying on Sikuli and we love it too. The biggest advantage of Sikuli is that it’s open source and it’s easily integrated with other test framework or tool. And Sikuli keeps enhancing with lots for cool features (they just have a new release)
Can you please give us a more detail comparison between Eggplant and Sikuli? Sorry it’s not convincing for me to spend lots of money on Eggplant if we can do the same in Sikuli.