uBot Review
August 28, 2010 by Aleksandr
Filed under Link Building Software
uBot isn’t really a tool for building backlinks – it’s much more than that. For those of you that don’t know, uBot Studio is a graphical system for developing your own automated “bots”. There is a learning curve, but, in theory, uBot allows you to automate anything that you can do in a browser. That means you can build scraping tools, bots to setup wordpress, account creation bots – pretty much anything! And the best thing is that it’s built with internet marketers in mind.
To give you an idea of what uBot can do, here are a few bots I’ve made:
- Google Adwords keyword tool scraper – there’s even a tutorial on how to build a basic version, and it’s not difficult to expand and modify the bot to your own requirements.
- Mass WordPress Setup – Sometimes you need to setup a lot of sites quickly! This bot takes a list of sites, installs wordpress, activates plugins and changes all the settings to exactly what I want. It loads in the domains from a CSV file when the program runs, so I can setup a load of sites on autopilot and come back when its done.
- Article submission bot – It’s relatively easy to setup a bot to post a spun article (uBot handles spinners) to a number of sites in one go, whether they are one of the major directories or a distribution service (or both).
How It Works
All of uBot’s commands are easy to use – you don’t need any programming skills. A basic knowledge of If and While loops may make things easier, but it’s not essential.
To add commands to the program flow you just need to drag them to an empty node. The nodes are then played in order, with the only exception being subs which are uBot’s version of functions (tip: use subs with parameters wherever you can. It makes debugging much easier, and you’ll build up a library of functions over time). It’s all very simple, but if it sounds confusing go and watch a couple of the tutorial videos to get a better idea of how it works.
The real strength of uBot is how easy it is to interact with browser objects. The current page is displayed in a browser window within uBot, and you can right click on any element to view a whole list of commands. Whether you want to fill a text field, scrape a URL or click a button it only takes a few clicks. This makes building bots that interact with specific sites very simple.
Another great thing about uBot is that you can export bots as .exe files and then sell them or send them to your outsourcers. They don’t need to have uBot installed to run the .exe. I’ve seen a few uBots being sold – some successfully – so this might be something to think about if you need an extra income stream.
Backlinks are what this site is all about, so how does uBot compare to other tools? There really is nothing like it if you want to build custom backlink bots. Magic submitter has a built in site editor, but it doesn’t have the same versatility. You can literally target ANY site/software on the internet, which could give you a major advantage if you learn how to use the tool properly. Be prepared for some frustration when building bots though, especially to begin with.
Bots usually only run on a single thread (there is an option for multi threaded bots, but most people don’t use it in this way), which means that each page has to be loaded fully in the browser window. The result is that bots can be slow. If there’s a certain type of site you want to hit, or you just want to automate your backlink process and aren’t too worried about speed, then a bot can work well though.
For automating simple tasks, uBot works great and can save you a LOT of time and money. The slow nature of bots means that it doesn’t work that well for mass link building, and there are much better tools for that.
Good points:
- Easy to automate simple browser based tasks, with scope to build bigger bots once you learn how to use it.
- Supports proxies (there have been problems with certain private proxies in the past though, so check this on the forums)
- Supports several different captcha services
- Support for spinners
- Easily interact with .csv files using built in tables or lists
- Export to .exe function
- Built in account information generator (i.e. uBot provides a random username, first name, zip code etc)
- Scraping functions are very useful for getting data
- Support for if-else and while loops gives you much greater control when building large bots
Bad points:
- Running a large bot can sometimes cause unreliability issues. These have been dramatically improved though.
- Too slow for mass link building
- Small learning curve
Should you buy uBot?
uBot isn’t going to immediately make you more money, or propel your site to top spot automatically. It is great for automating boring and repetitive tasks, but it only does what you tell it. If you have specific browser based tasks (uBot CAN’T automate anything in the OS) in mind, then I’d definitely recommend it. If you don’t already have a process that’s working manually though, then automating it isn’t going to help.
I’ve used uBot for around 8 months and I couldn’t live without it. There are problems (as you’d expect from such an ambitious project) but there’s no other tool that allows you to build a custom bot in hours, rather than days.
On a side note, the uBot development team – while extremely passionate and easy to contact via the forum – has a tendency to not fully document their work and changes. This can be a bit frustrating. There were some problems a while back with the team making a change that most uBotters didn’t like, but they listened to feedback and implemented a solution quickly. If you have a problem then they are usually quick to respond on the forum.
If you found this review useful, please consider buying through Alex’s affiliate link. Thanks!
I found your site from the backlinks forum post. I’ve been looking at getting uBot as a way to automate my tasks. I never seem to do things unless its automated. So I started building my own VBA based program in excel. I’ve got it automating simple registrations, but I’m wondering if I should switch to uBot or not. It looks great but you still have to “teach” it to know what to scrape. Being a web dev its easy for me to scrape data or whatever I want. Some problems occur with JS. Can uBot run a JS command that you place for the page?
Is it worth switching dev effort to uBot to save time. VBA isnt a great platform either
I may just go to pure VB if it works out (should be easy to port). But the thing I like about VBA in Excel is all the data, URLs etc can be stored in multiple worksheets in one file and acessed to automated tasks. And I can Build multiple forms with browsers to speed up tasks.
When you say ubot has the ability to do multi thread is this something easy to do? or is it still buggy?
I was also reading on the forums that uBot can fail to compile when you have a larger bot (ie posting to 100+ sites for example) because the size gets too big. Have you had to do that or do you just make smaller bots and chain them together to run one huge bot?
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike,
I have never heard of anyone using VBA for that kind of thing, its been a long time since I used VBA myself and used to use PHP for accessing other sites.
Ubot takes a bit of getting used to, but I am sure it would be a lot easier than your VBA macros.
You do have to “teach” it everything you want it to do. It is a mixture of recording things (as you would a macro) and then editing the results to add logic like if statements and loops.
To be honest it is not that user friendly and does take a bit of getting used to, but once your proficient with it its pretty easy.
I am not sure what you mean by “can ubot run js command”. When you “record” actions with Ubot it will execute the javascript. It handles ajax quite nicely, for example I have had it updating ajaxed fields in forms and it works well. That would be a real pain to code any other way.
You can save data to file from ubot, it can work with CSV lists, which you could open up afterwards in Excel.
I have not used it myself for some time, which is why I asked a friend to write this particular post. Unfortunately he is away at the moment so I cannot ask him about threading.
As for your last point about failing, when I last used Ubot it was pretty flakey and it does do some strange things from time to time. The programs it creates are not the most robust apps you will ever encounter, but they do the job.
The main issue I have with Ubot is speed, it is very slow to run because it controls Internet Explorer, so, it is not like a specialize app that just makes HTTP requests, it is using the browser to execute everything, which is why it handles Ajax and JS so easily.
It is better to make several smaller bots and then string them together. You can call a series of scripts from one master, so you could create 5 profile makers for different platforms, then have a master script call each of them in turn so that one app will go off and register all 5.
I dont know if you have seen this thread on Automated Backlinks Monthly:
http://backlinksforum.com/showthread.php/831-Automated-Backlinks-Monthly-Automated-Link-Building-Across-10-Different-Platforms!
But those are all Ubots, that is a good example of what you can do with it.
There are a lot of people selling their compiled Ubots at the moment.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the quick response. That actually helps quite a lot.
Those bots in the link are almost exactly what I want to be building on my own. So it looks like uBot can do it. I essentially want to build everything on my own so I can avoid the monthly fees associated with those type of services. I’m a programmer so its easy to pick up on.
I may just give ubot a try, as it has the money back guarantee. And it should be able to do what I want to do. What I’m doing in VBA is basically the same – controlling Internet Explorer in a WebBrowser control. So I can call any javascript to run on the page so its pretty efficient at doing any type of page.
Same drawback as ubot in that it is a bit slow because of running IE, but its not too bad and in VBA I can create multiple forms with different webbrowsers working away. I have my VBA running now where I can add a new site in about 10 minutes or so.
Thanks for your reply.
Glad to be of service… throw me a link some time if you like the site :p
I shoudl have added an affiliate link as it looks like I just made a sale, not to worry!
I do not know anyone that has tried to get their money back in the 30 days, everyone I know that bought it kept it. I would hope they would honour it, but I have found to my cost that PayPal do not enforce this. Even if a site has “cast iron money back guarantee” and they fail to honour it PP dont care… but like I said, I am pretty sure guys from Ubot Studio would, its not some fly by night thing they have going.
I would give it a whirl, TBH it sounds like your trying to re-invent the wheel a bit with this VBA stuff, and the time you spend maintaining that could be put into building more stuff…
If you do buy it I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on it after using it for a while… so please pop back once youve tried it
Could you automate PostRunner submission with this tool?
I have not tried, but I am sure it could be, however, it would “break” when categories changed or sites were added / removed.
Personally I think it would be more trouble than it is worth to attempt it.
Well, even if it could just mass upload articles, that would be a huge time saver. I might have to try it and play around with it.