iMacros is good but unreliable. Is there any alternative?

Question

iMacros is a very nice tool which allows to authomatically fill HTML forms and extract content, includes cycles and many other features. The problem is that it is quite tricky to make it extracting content properly. For example, I have failed to extract all London-to-Tokio flight prices for all the dates between 1/10/08 to 1/12/08 to find a cheapest one from expedia. Sometimes it just crashes. Does anyone know any good alternative?

Answer 1

Bah, I installed it but never really used it: I am happy enough with Greasemonkey.
Chickenfoot can make it more edible...

Searching for URLs, I found also DéjàClick and Selenium IDE but I don't really know them.
There are lot of other tools for Web automation, most of them professional (read "payware"...).

Alternatively, for just data extraction, I would use cURL or wget and a good HTML parser...

Answer 2

I have heard good things about Selenium IDE also and my limited testing indicates it is pretty capable, and works in Firefox and IE.

For most any macro based testing tool, you will need to do some programming if you need to support multiple, repeatable test cases.

That said, in your example you mention running an Expedia macro... presumably to scrape results. You will want to make sure that you don't hammer Expedia's servers, and/or expect to be booted once they discover you are (effectively) a bot.

Answer 3

I have found a much better software for developing Bots. Oh, and the price tag of this software is %50 cheaper than Imacros. Anyway I used Imacros for almost a year til I found this new program. With no need to control your scripts with other programing languages, this software can create complex bots, complete with conditional statements, proxy flipping support, and also uses decaptcher for the handling of captchas.

You guys should seriously check it out before purchasing Imacros scripting edition. I wish that I had... Also I am able to give an extra $50 off of the regular purchase price. So write down this coupon code and save even more.

Link: UBot Studio Bot Creation Software

Coupon Code: discountedBots

If anything watch a few of the video tutorials posted on the next page, they explain the features in great detail.