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Appium vs Ionic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Ionic
Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Mobile Development Platforms category, the mindshare of Appium is 3.0%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Ionic is 5.4%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Mobile Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Ionic5.4%
Appium3.0%
Other91.6%
Mobile Development Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Independent consultant, at OpenText
Efficient mobile testing with intuitive emulation capabilities and a user-friendly interface
Initial setup for Appium (especially for iOS) is not beginner-friendly.Consumes too much of your host machine's resources, potentially slowing down the machine.Appium Inspector often lacks deep insight or crashes with certain app builds. Improve test flakiness by intelligently selecting robust self-healing locators,simplified installers, better documentation, GUI-based config management,smart wait mechanisms and better failure logs.
Dansteve Adekanbi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Frontend Developer Consultant at Modus Create
Great user acceptance and reliability, multiple teams not required, with prompt customer service
As a developer, I would say one of the improvements is more plugins. More plugins give you the ability to do more interactions with the framework over the library. As a user, I would say more flexibility in terms of look and feel. So far Ionic is very fluid. You might not really know, it is web-based technology. I know recently it has gone through a lot of updates, but it can also be improved and become stronger. Ionic allows you to get the best customization ever, but there is nothing like having more. The more customization you get, the easier it is for you to be able to build more quality apps.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The way Appium server interacts with mobile apps is fantastic. It provides all the information about the elements inside the app, Android as well as iOS. I can interact with the element quickly, just type some text or get some text values from the element - whether it's a drop-down, or web text, or a native element."
"Appium helps me to do as much as much as I want to."
"What I like about Appium right now is that it's like Cypress in the sense that............. to test the components in the way I want them to be tested."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to launch applications. Appium has everything that Selenium has. So many good tools support Appium. We can take some Excel sheets and use them to fill out the text box that's in there. We can also take screenshots of failures."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"The most valuable features of Appium are the in-built functionality, which we can use in our code. For example, move back, move front, navigate one page before, and navigate one page ahead. You can do this by using the in-built functions from Appium."
"It has great documentation and excellent community support."
"I like that I can place the code and escalate data storage. I also like that it's user-friendly. Nothing is complex in Ionic."
"Ionic's best feature is that it's not necessary to write your own custom codes as all the hybrid is provided by Angular."
"It's very flexible for UI development."
"The most valuable feature is the one code deployed to all solutions, which means you do not need to have multiple teams."
"What I like the most about Ionic is live reloading, which enables us to develop new features without having to build the application again and re-check the functionality."
"With the Capacitor feature, you have access to the native attributes of your phone such as your camera. This makes work a lot easier."
"Ionic's best features are its hybrid app development, design, and tags."
"The most valuable feature of Ionic is the ease of use and the simple connection of the applications. Additionally, the documentation is good in the Ionic application, and beginners can easily learn and download their own application using Ionic. Everyone can easily switch out, their domain, from native applications to hybrid applications."
 

Cons

"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"It breaks down."
"The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"Appium can improve when the case fails, there should be a feature where you can generate the report from Appium. Once you're on a test case, automatically the screenshot should be captured which would avoid manual intervention. These features would be beneficial to migrate to Appium."
"The installation part of Appium is somewhat clumsy, requiring numerous dependencies and configurations."
"They should add an in-built framework."
"There is a lack of a community environment."
"Ionic's UI component doesn't always look like the native mobile app."
"They started writing Capacitor to get rid of PhoneGap and Cordova, but they haven't yet got all the libraries and all the functionalities. They want you to start using Capacitor, but they don't have all the libraries there. They're developing them as they go. So, currently, you have to mix and match the three. When it comes to mobile applications, I would only like to use Capacitor. I don't want to jump between Cordova and Capacitor or have both of them. That's the main thing for me, but they have been working on it."
"Ionic could improve in the Native mode because while we do testing it is difficult to find the root cause of problems. It could be more user-friendly."
"It would be good if the mobile version uses something other than JavaScript and HTML."
"Ionic is a cross-platform framework, so when we compare Ionic with native Android and iOS, we can see the drawbacks. For example, if you need to work on very high-level aspects of an application such as animation, even if everything else is not putting load on the app, you will still see high load from the server side."
"The documentation could be improved."
"In a future release, we would like to have a little more support for the desktop environment. Currently it is still focused on mobile devices."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"The solution is open-source."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"We found out that we could explore features of the solution for 30 days trial. We can switch to a permanent license later if we want."
"You don't have to pay anything except for certain projects. For example, Appflow has some costs related to it but you don't have to use it. You can also pay for extra support."
"Ionic is an open-source solution, it is free."
"The solution's open source option is free with no licensing fees."
"The starting cost for the enterprise option is around one hundred dollars per month."
"You can use the free version, but if you still want to buy it, the price starts from $499/month."
"Ionic is an open source solution, and there are no hidden fees."
"We pay 50,000 dinars per month."
"I think most of the plugins for Ionic are open source, and you can do a lot with many of the basic features. However, if you need to use a premium plugin for something like extra scroll list functionality, Ionic will ask for a certain sum of money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Educational Organization
17%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend Appium?
I do recommend Appium. It is an open-source solution and completely free of charge. We use Appium and Appium Studio as our base for any type of mobile automation for testing. It has a great interfa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appium?
My experience with Appium from a pricing perspective is favorable due to it being open source, making it a cost-effective option.
What needs improvement with Appium?
The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement. Additionally, the wait time functionality could be enhanced as I experienced failures with longer wait times.
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
MRA, Napa Group, Sworkit, Airbus, Sense Corp, Interactive Gaming Company, Pacifica, Untapp'd, Diesel, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. Ionic and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.