Perhaps the answer to your question depends on what, exactly, you wish to accomplish.

I have used a variant of my present automated directional strategy for more than ten years. It has two keys: 1) Getting the direction right in its three markets (ES, CL, and 6E); 2) Successfully trading any of those three markets in a defensive manner if it has gotten the direction wrong. By successfully adhering to those two principles, it rarely has suffered losing days. And when it has, those losses have been manageable and relatively benign.

To accomplish consistent and positive results, playing for "singles" rather than "home runs", I've integrated NinjaTrader with a sophisticated universal price-table matrix that I created in Microsoft Excel more than twelve years ago.

Write to me for details, if you would like to know more.

Indeed, it very much depends on what you want, your skill set and how much you can afford. At the moment I only know two platforms that offer a kind of "ready to go" development environment: Metatrader and NinjaTrader. With these two you don’t have to worry about storing data, drawing charts, message handling, etc. The tool does it for you, so you only have to think about your strategy. It is relatively easy to get in to and great for private traders.

At the other end of the spectrum you have big trading companies who can afford something much more sophisticated. So they might do all their development in C++ or C# and connect to exchanges via API for instance. They can achieve much more but that also means that they have to do everything themselves.

So it all depends in on you. What is within you capabilities?

If you are trading any asset in N.America you might as well stay with NT. If you need to trade markets outside of N.America you only have a couple of alternatives due to the huge lack of intelligence in architecture. When you begin to trade markets where tick sizes are variable, lot size set by exchange, companies marked as shortable by exchange and whether or not foreigners can own/buy any more today you have to build a security master. The best tool in that situation is AMI Broker. Their support is absolutely the best of which I've ever experienced.

I like also like Wealth-Lab, however they have forsaken all customer that purchased their product (free to Fido customers in N.America) for use in global markets. Ironic - you must pay to license and then there is only enhancement and development for use of Fido customers.

I will add that, prior to programming my strategy into Ninja Trader, I, too, used AmiBroker. When I was introduced to it initially in 2002, it was kind of a "poor man's TradeStation". At the time, TradeStation had just changed from an application one could buy in a box (TS 2000i) to one that was available only to those who opened accounts at the TradeStation brokerage. I refused to do that and thereby learned about AmiBroker a short time afterward.

AmiBroker's support was excellent, as Hank mentioned above. It also was satisfactory for my purposes for a while, although once introduced to NinjaTrader, I preferred NT's programmability. As my strategy is quite complex, NT handled that complexity well. In essence, my strategy actually is comprised of 50 substrategies. NT handled that complexity without so much as a hiccup - particularly once I integrated the concepts of Market Profile and its Value Areas into my strategy two years ago - whereas AmiBroker would have been more challenging to use for that purpose.

Again, this brings us back to my initial comment - the "best platform" for use in automation depends on what, exactly, you desire to accomplish. Of course, as mentioned above, it also depends on your resources.