I previous wrote an article Automation software: AutoHotKey vs AutoIt. The purpose of the article was to rant about AutoIt, an automation scripting language I have used for at least twenty years now. The original purpose of AutoIt was to automate a series of processes on a remote computer. I wanted it to run a commercial program to extract some data I needed for software I had written.
Over the years, the purpose changed. It became a tool to automate the login of websites. Continuing to use AutoIt underlies one of the problems we programmers face. Once you commit to a language, invest the time to learn it and master it ... you continue to use it despite its shortcomings. And AutoIt has many shortcomings when it comes to automating websites.
I (we) tolerated AutoIt's idiosyncrasies.
There are essentially only two ways to control a website with AutoIt. The first is the built-in "methods" ... that is to send keystrokes. You have to predict where these keystrokes will land. Totally undesirable, totally. But when it is the only game in town, you use it.
AutoIt also supports third party libraries. Each browser has its own third party library, all similar in functionality. I regret to say that I tried these third party libraries: the Webdriver UDF. The Chrome library uses the ChromeDriver. The Firefox library uses the GeckoDriver. The drivers are very close to what is needed but are "awkward". The first aspect of "awkward" is that the drivers don't actually use the installed browser, but rather their own "stub". You can't just start a browser and interact with it. You have to launch a stub and work with that.
You could easily call this a trade-off for the ability to automate. But one major problem is that the scam detection tools for the browsers are aware of these stubs and without any exception, prevent you from carrying out the action you are trying to automate. Overused by scammers, I guess.
It's not the only trade-off. There is also a problem with exiting your appliation ... the stub remains in memory. Launch another process and you add to the memory issue.
What a waste of time.
I found another tool, AutoHotKey or AHK, that automates website logins exactly the way I want automation to work. Launch the website, find the username and password fields, populate them, and then click the sign in button.
I switched over to AHK as fast as I could. A bit of a mistake in acting so fast. AutoIt did have its strengths. If only I could put the two together. Use AutoIt to handle user interactions and use AHK for the background automation with websites.
I did exactly that.
To answer the question in the title ... which one is best, which one wins. Well, they both do.