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Appium vs Perfecto comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (9th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Perfecto
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Performance Testing Tools (15th), Functional Testing Tools (16th), Mobile App Testing Tools (6th), Test Automation Tools (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Appium and Perfecto aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Appium is designed for Mobile Development Platforms and holds a mindshare of 2.7%, down 4.4% compared to last year.
Perfecto, on the other hand, focuses on Mobile App Testing Tools, holds 6.6% mindshare, up 5.0% since last year.
Mobile Development Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Appium2.7%
OutSystems9.7%
Temenos Quantum8.9%
Other78.7%
Mobile Development Platforms
Mobile App Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Perfecto6.6%
Tricentis Tosca23.2%
OpenText Functional Testing16.6%
Other53.6%
Mobile App Testing Tools
 

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.
Glenford John - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager, Device Integration at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Saves us $2.6 million per year, provides more efficient testing, and helps us strengthen relationships with vendors
The automation piece is the most valuable feature. Every time we had a new version of either OS or an application, we found that being able to automate the testing across different devices is very valuable. Perfecto is great at executing cross-platform testing. From a carrier perspective, it's all mobile, but we also have web applications. We used to be able to test on Symbian, Windows OS, Android, and iOS. Today, we can go on a big screen and test on Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, and other browsers. My team leverages Perfecto's reporting and analytics. When we start stress testing an application, we can look at all the reporting that comes from that, and we can tell at what part of the day the app is performing better. Our analytics are very important to us. Presentations are important, so it's good to have reports with graphs that show the time of day or how the app was performing for months at a time. We use those reports to screen capture, go with the data, and to show to upper management. We can do a comparison of one version performance to another version of the application or device performance. We utilize Perfecto's cloud-based lab to test across devices, browsers, and OSs. We are a carrier, so we have our devices with different OS versions of devices. Right now, it's mostly just Apple and Androids. Back in the day, they had many different versions of the OS, but the only other thing on top of that is web-based browsers. We don't test Linux, which is an operating system of Windows. We don't use Perfecto's cloud. We use our own devices because we test on only our organization's devices. Unless we do some kind of competitive analysis, it's not really a test; it's just a comparison to see how other solutions compare to ours. The range of open-source technologies that Perfecto supports is great. I have a team of contractors that report to me and do all the testing for our organization, and that team turns over every couple of years. We mostly utilize the in-house automation that is available for anyone who isn't a great programmer. They have support for all these other drivers, and they have something for non-programmers who want to automate their work, which is amazing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"Appium's wide support of programming languages is valuable."
"The automation part is extremely helpful in streamlining our processes."
"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."
"Obviously because of automation, it reduces manual testing efforts."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"We get a list that shows all devices that are connected to the system."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"Perfecto facilitates delivering the product on time, through the cloud devices, so that there is no impact to our end-users."
"We are continuously doing testing on different environments, devices, and platforms. It executes seamlessly on multiple devices without having any connectivity issues. It has been really helpful for us to test on cloud devices."
"Perfecto's device lab has helped us to scale our testing and it has made testing easier for us."
"Perfecto is part of our testing life; when we test, we do it in Perfecto, and without it, our team would not be able to perform testing on mobile devices."
"The reporting feature is really tough to find in some of the other products that are competitors. Having your CITB type dashboard, where we can see the test results and see recordings of each test that passed or failed, is probably one of the distinguishing aspects of Perfecto."
"There are a whole bunch of things that I like about the solution, but I really love the interaction it has with mobile devices, the testing capabilities, as well as reporting capabilities that we get from the application. The reports are very detailed."
"Overall, it's a great solution."
"We have seen the biggest improvement in cost savings, initially saving $2.6 million a year just on roaming charges."
 

Cons

"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."
"Appium could improve by enabling record and run techniques similar to what they have in other licensing tools, such as Micro Focus. We have to all write the code, and then we can proceed."
"Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes."
"I'm facing a lot of issues with my new juniors when they set up Appium for iOS."
"Support-wise, it could be better."
"Appium could improve by enabling record and run techniques similar to what they have in other licensing tools, such as Micro Focus. We have to all write the code, and then we can proceed."
"One area where I think Appium could improve is in addressing security concerns for our data. Currently, we're unable to use cloud solutions like CloudForm due to security restrictions on our servers. We also face challenges in updating packages for the same reason. It would be beneficial if the solution could provide better support for auto-reporting and easier connections to mobile device farms."
"The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky."
"The flakiness, or the accuracy, of the test execution can be improved."
"It does well for mobile testing, but when it comes to the web aspect, it is lagging a little bit in terms of execution."
"It is slow compared to physical device testing. The interactive speed could be improved."
"We feel that Perfecto is a little slow. If they could improve on that slowness in accessing the app, when we want to click a button, that would be great because we feel the difference. An improvement in the connectivity speed is required."
"It is slow compared to physical device testing. The interactive speed could be improved."
"The flakiness, or the accuracy, of the test execution can be improved. Also, the responsiveness of their cloud lab could be improved as well."
"One improvement would be speed of execution. If it is an iOS native app, we have noticed that the speed is a bit slower."
"Previously, we used the cradle. Every time the mobile was blocking it, we would have to ask Perfecto to provide another one. That took a lot of time away from us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is open source so it is free."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"I'm unsure if there's any cost associated with Appium. I got the free package which includes the server GUI application and the inspector application, and it was free to download, and that's all I need to get my work done. I'm not aware of any additional costs associated with the tool."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"The solution is open-source."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"Perfecto's price is excellent compared to other products with similar features. It was the lowest of the three we evaluated. We also established a partnership with Perfecto, so they provide discounts when we sell Perfecto projects and licenses to our customers."
"Although Perfecto is a good product for us to use, it is a bit expensive. It takes management a bit of work to find the appropriate funding for us to keep Perfecto. I imagine there could be some way to make it more accessible."
"Pricing-wise, it is fine. It is not as expensive as what we used to have in the past from HP, IBM, and others. It is decently priced."
"I am not sure about its pricing, but from our perspective, licensing has been easy. Anytime I have new users or requests for users that want to get added, it's a very simple process. I just give the architectural owner of the product the name and email address, and they're able to easily add a new user. We don't have any issues in regards to getting licenses, but I don't have any insights into pricing."
"This is an expensive solution compared to others, by 30% to 40%."
"Pricing is an area where Perfecto can do a little better. When we obtain additional licenses, we enter into negotiations with them."
"Perfecto is about 30-40% cheaper than Device Anywhere. That was a big reason why we switched. Perfecto also solves some of the issues that we had with Device Anywhere. We have grown by 100% since we started to use Perfecto, and now we have devices roaming. When we look at the competition, we would still stick with Perfecto."
"Perfecto has definitely saved us on the costs and efforts of having to maintain our own virtual test environment. We lost about 20 devices in the past to maintenance and audit. That was a massive loss for us, as a company, because we were giving devices to someone, but don't know whether we would get it back or not. Having those virtual labs, we don't need to worry about these kinds of things. We are easily saving $5,000 to $10,000 a month on device costing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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 Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise23
 

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
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Perfecto Mobile, Perfecto Web
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Virgin Media, Paychex, Rabobank, R+V, Discover
Find out what your peers are saying about Mendix, OutSystems, Salesforce and others in Mobile Development Platforms. Updated: March 2026.
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