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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 (14th), Functional Testing Tools (16th), Mobile App Testing Tools (5th), Test Automation Tools (19th)
 

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 4.2% compared to last year.
Perfecto, on the other hand, focuses on Mobile App Testing Tools, holds 7.0% mindshare, up 5.2% since last year.
Mobile Development Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Appium2.7%
OutSystems9.3%
Temenos Quantum8.6%
Other79.4%
Mobile Development Platforms
Mobile App Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Perfecto7.0%
Tricentis Tosca21.9%
OpenText Functional Testing17.1%
Other54.0%
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's one of the most stable solutions for mobile automation."
"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"Within a single command, we can easily connect to the device."
"The best feature of Appium is that it allows you to inspect the element. With the Appium Inspector, you don't have to install another application to do the inspection. I also like that Appium has Android device connectivity. Currently, most people use Appium as automation software, and I haven't found any other tool that's more powerful than Appium."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"I like the app inspector; it's quite a good and useful tool for us, we can use it almost out of the box, it works well on Android, the solution is stable and very scalable, and it is free to use."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It has saved hours of manual testing time, costs and efforts."
"Mobile testing is the most valuable feature as it has reduced dependency on physical devices. We are located offshore and we don't have the physical devices, and shipping physical devices after every new release would be a difficult task. But with Perfecto, it is easy."
"The Perfecto device lab has allowed us to run tests on multiple devices at the same time and across multiple platforms as well, increasing the efficiency of our testing and saving money, time, and effort while enabling comprehensive testing and high app quality that we otherwise wouldn't be able to achieve."
"Perfecto has affected our software quality in a good way. It has allowed us to execute on-demand and on-choice. We also track the number of issues that we find in the product. Every single day, we tag the issues that we found. For example, if something was found by automation, that means it was found by a Perfecto execution. Over time, we realized the real value in tracking those numbers. We can see now that we have clearly been finding issues earlier. It has allowed us to catch our defects earlier, thus improving the quality of our applications."
"The quality of our software has improved since we implemented this solution."
"Overall, it has helped massively to speed up our testing efforts and not just from a device point of view."
 

Cons

"We previously worked with native applications, and there weren't any good mobile app testing tools. We started working with React Native, which works well with Appium, but it would be good to see better integration; the way elements are displayed can be messy. React Native is very popular nowadays, so it's essential to have that compatibility."
"Sometimes, the Appium server won't connect with the mobile application because of some socket issues, so network connectivity between applications and the Appium server could be improved."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"Appium doesn't recognize IDs placed by our developers on nested elements when we use React Native for iOS; it just sees the whole page and one element."
"The installation part of Appium is somewhat clumsy, requiring numerous dependencies and configurations."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"The initial setup is straightforward if you have previous experience with the solution, but it can be complicated for a novice user."
"The last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow."
"Going by the dashboard or analytics capabilities that Perfecto or Perforce is looking to offer in its roadmap, it will certainly help if they also cater to executing and enabling decision-making, rather than just focusing on standard testing metrics such as execution, efficiency, and defect rate. These are good metrics, but they don't necessarily enable decision-making for SLTs. Any improvements in the dashboards and reporting tools should focus on metrics or SLAs that can help with decision-making."
"If we could run an accessibility test in Perfecto against builds, it would help us a lot. Currently, that's a very manual process for us. We haven't found a tool that can do accessibility scans for iOS and doesn't depend on engineering effort. Having a feature related to that would be really awesome for us."
"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."
"It would be ideal if there was a complete integration with other test management tools and other applications like HPLM, Micro Focus, or Microsoft Azure."
"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."
"We have had some issues with performance, which is something that should be improved."
"When using devices on the cloud, it lags quite a bit at times. I know that these are real devices that are being projected on our laptop screens and monitors, but if the speed could be improved, that would be good."
"It would be ideal if there was a complete integration with other test management tools and other applications like HPLM, Micro Focus, or Microsoft Azure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"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."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"The solution is free."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"The solution is open source."
"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."
"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."
"It's definitely on the higher end of prices for this type of service."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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%."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare 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 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: May 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.