Richard Lawrence

I’ve noticed a pattern with several of my .NET clients who want to get into automated acceptance testing for web applications. They like the idea of WatiN because it would let them write tests in the same language as their production code. But then they notice that there’s much more documentation and apparently a much more active community around Watir. And that Ruby language looks interesting too. What to do?

I think there are good arguments for both. Here are the major pros and cons from my perspective…

WatiN

Watir

The Bottom Line

On balance, I think Watir is the better tool, has the better documentation, the most active community, and the best long-term prospects. But I understand the desire to standardize on C# or VB.NET for both production and test code. The long-term cost of adding another language to a product is not something to ignore.

Personally, I’ll continue to use and teach both tools with clients. When it comes to my own projects, however, I’ll be using and extending Watir, for all the reasons above and simply because I enjoy working with Ruby.

Which do you use and why?