Best Robotic Desktop Automation for small scale windows automation!

Softomotive WinAutomation is well suited for beginners and entry level RPA developers who want to learn Computer Automation.

Pros

- Light weight Robotic Automation - Easy to learn and fast processing - Data Scraping is much faster than other tools in RPA - Pre-built robots make it very simple to use

Cons

- WinAutomation does not provide cloud support for remote accessing the robots - Winautomation enterprise edition also have very less features - DataScraping manually requires an understanding of Regular Expressions - Academy tutorials are not updated with new software release

Good product destroyed by poor management and support

Was good until v7 was released, now refuse to do business with them

Pros

Easy to use, very functional, was easy to distribute but read Cons below

Cons

Like others I am so disappointed by the direction WinAutomation has taken. Was a reliable product that would easily allow you to build and compile programs to perform your automation functions - we used it in various different areas. The when v7 was released they completely forgot about their customers and came up with the horrible idea of tokens (additional purchases) for each executable you wanted to compile, and worse they tried their damnedest to hide this from their users - so many of us upgraded to version 7 only to find out that we had been hoodwinked by this new licensing policy. And then they destroyed their user community further by killing their once-active forums where users would share ideas and methodologies - first they shifted it to LinkedIn, which never worked well, and then they realised their error and brought it back to their own domain, but they removed all the historic forum posts when they realised no one was upgrading but were still communicating solutions on the older version of the product - there just was not enough new functionality in v7 and onwards for people to justify their silly licensing decision. AVOID using this product! The company is untrustworthy and has made very poor business decisions to the detriment of a large user community. And just when they were starting to get good, too - such a shame. Other products on the market are just as powerful and less expensive.

Was a great product but they got greedy and make you pay for everything that you automate

Prior to the whole "you MUST buy tokens to be able to use the software that you already spent a lot of money on", they had a really good product that did things not found in other types of automation programs. You can compile your scripts/processes to run on other machines ... except now you have to pay for every little thing that you automate OR spend a lot of money to "register" a computer that you want to run unlimited exe's on. Of course, this is after you have already paid a premium price for the software. They don't advertise the costs up front because they want you to buy the software ... once you log into your account you finally get to see the costs for various tokens and functionality. We didn't appreciate the sneaky approach they decided would be a good business model. As horrible as the whole upgrade experience is/was, it is our hope that they drop this business model and get back to what made them great to begin with. They have great software but they have lost our business until they stop crippling it. We are in the process of moving on to a different product.

Pros

It does things that other software packages do not do (like search for an image on a screen that isn't identifiable via other means).

Cons

Steep learning curve. Recent versions now make you pay for everything that you create - making the software absolutely useless in an enterprise environment where you have to pay for the executable that you generate ... except if you discover an error and need to recompile and recreate your executable to fix something (which happens most of the time), you have to PAY AGAIN. I spent years learning and using Winautomation and it was awesome to be able to create solutions on the fly where there weren't any viable alternatives, but their greed has destroyed the flexible nature of what this software did best. The support people know their stuff, but moving the support forum to Linked-In groups has been a miserable switch....searching is problematic ... anything negative at all (even if it is constructive feedback) is deleted by the moderators.... it is like they are doing everything humanly possible to make the software and the company fail. I find this sad because I really like the software and the latest functionality that the newer versions bring. We were tricked into upgrading to Version 7 during a sales WebEx (no mention of the additional costs at all except a brief 1 sec mention of tokens that was not explained). Even though we have paid for the professional version upgrade, we went back to our old version (version 6) as soon as we realized how crippled the latest versions are unless you are willing to hand over large amounts of cash for a small fraction of the functionality the older versions had..

Automating is a breeze

We used to have 4 people performing redundant excel and database functionalities for 4 hours daily, but because of Winautomation we were able to reduce this task to 1 person 1 hour daily. Also, the software is great with automating batched DOS based functions like renaming thousands of files in a couple of minutes, up/down file via ftp sights, etc.

Pros

Easy to learn and use. So much features and a massive array of programming capabilities

Cons

Before their customer service is great with chat option on their site, they changed that. I sent out a request a week ago and received a response with vague answer. I replied back, no response. I made a new ticket and the response was, we sent you an answer, click here to see our conversation. I responded back 2x, 2 days now no reponse.

Good tool, but recent licensing changes are BAD for customers.

Task automation, bad licensing changes.

Pros

Very flexible and easy to use drag-and-drop scripting environment that can be used to automate most any Windows task. Scripts can be compiled into executables and provided to users to help their day-to-day activities.

Cons

Starting with version 7, they now force you to PAY to run the executables you've made if you distribute them to other PCs. This is a HUGE change from version 6, and makes this product FAR more expensive than before. The company isn't even honest enough to admit that this is bad for the customer, and claims they "intended" to charge for exe's before (but never did). I paid when I bought WinAutomation, I paid for annual support/maintenance, and I paid my staff to develop scripts... and now WinAutomation wants me to pay AGAIN to use the software we wrote??? That's total rubbish, and a clear money grab by this company. Also, the web-based user forum has no recent entries, has moved to Linkedin (but will not let people join). Is this (and the licensing change) a sign that the company is on its way out? No idea, but it's very disappointing, since the software was quite good.