What is Kantu?
Kantu is an open source automation tool created by Ui.Vision which combines Visual Web Automation and Selenium IDE++. It allows anyone to start writing automated visual tests with Kantu.
Main Features
- Read images and words
- Click, move, drag & drop and type.
- Browser commands to verify and validate the layout of websites and elements
- Resize browser’s window to emulate various resolutions. This is particularly useful to test layouts on different browser resolutions.
Interface
The record function is useful to perform basic functions such as clicking and typing something.
Users can choose between the table view or source view depending on their preferences.
Storage Modes
- Inside the web browser using HTML5 local storage
- Directly on the hard drive (Need to download FileAccess XModule)
If you need to collaborate as a team, it would be good to set up XModule to use the hard drive storage option. By doing so, team members can easily share macros, images and CSV files with each other by pointing the Kantu home folder to a shared location (E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive or Github)
Top 3 Favorites from Kantu Browser Extension
Kantu provides over 20 Demo Macros for their users to try out. I have selected 3 of the demo macros that might be helpful to new users.
- DemoCsvSave → Extract data from a table and download the data
- DemoAutoFill → Fill in data accordingly
- DemoTakeScreenshots → Capture screenshots using Kantu commands
Conclusion
Overall, it took me a shorter time than expected to pick up Kantu as the creators have prepared a series of demo macros for new users. By going through the demo macros, I could recycle the commands to automate my own process. Furthermore, Kantu is simple to set up. Users can start browser automation by clicking on the Kantu extension icon on their browser. Therefore, the Kantu browser extension would be a good starting point for users who have not used any RPA tools.
With that being said, the browser extension might not be sufficient for enterprise users since it only performs basic functions on web browsers. Hence, enterprise users can consider using Kantu’s Desktop Automation tool to automate more complex workflows.
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions. The next post will probably be a short article to guide new users on Kantu.
