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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

"The latest versions of the solution are stable."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"It has flaws, but is still much better than any other cross-platform mobile automation tool."
"We develop apps using the React Native framework, and Appium integrates well for testing those apps. The Appium automation framework also has good integration with GitHub Actions and plenty of other tools and frameworks, including BrowserStack."
"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."
"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."
"The solution helps with test automation. We focus mostly on Java."
"Overall, it has definitely translated to cost savings and the reason is multifold."
"Overall, it's a great solution."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is that it covers all types of devices on the market allowing you to test different versions of an operating system."
"The quality of our software has improved since we implemented this solution."
"One of the good things about Perfecto is the scalability that it provides, as we are able to quickly scale up the devices and choose Android devices, web-based applications, or whatever we need, and we can scale up quickly and easily."
"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."
"It saves on the cost and effort of having to maintain our own virtual testing environment. Even our onshore team is not in the city that we work in, so that helps a lot. Even if we didn't invest a lot in getting multiple devices, having to share those devices would become a hassle."
"We are able to offer a quality product that has been tested fully, which improves our customer satisfaction. That is a good thing. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure cost. We don't have to spend a lot on setting up infrastructure, which becomes redundant or obsolete very soon. It helps in offsetting that cost."
 

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."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"Appium can improve when the case fails, there should be a feature where you can generate the report from Appium."
"The user interface needs improvement because there are issues when setting up environment variables."
"What needs improvement in Appium is its documentation. It needs to give more context on the libraries that Appium is using under the hood. For example, my team is using Appium for Android automation, and a lot of times, I feel that there's functionality that's available through the Appium interface, that exists within the UIAutomator, but there aren't a lot of useful or helpful resources on the internet to find that information, so it would be good to have some linkage with the underlying platform itself. Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes. For example, at times, there's a bug in the inspector application that doesn't allow me to save my desired capability set, so it would be nice to get that bug fixed, but overall, Appium is a good tool. The Touch Actions functionality in Appium also needs improvement. For example, if I want to initiate a scroll on the device that I'm running Appium on, sometimes Swipe works, but in other situations, I have to explicitly use action chains, so I'm not too sure what's the better approach. What I'd like to see in the next version of Appium is a more intelligent and more intuitive AppiumLibrary, in terms of identifying menus and scroll bars, etc., because right now, I'm unsure if I have to do a lot of export reversals to get to the elements I'm looking for. It would be nice to have some functionality built in, which would allow me to easily get those exports."
"Support-wise, it could be better. Whenever we get some issues, it may take some time."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"When using devices on the cloud, it lags quite a bit at times."
"The flakiness, or the accuracy, of the test execution can be improved. Also, the responsiveness of their cloud lab could be improved as well."
"In iOS, it needs improvements with some limitations."
"The monitoring features, in particular network traffic monitoring, could be improved."
"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."
"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 don't use Perforce's BlazeMeter with Perfecto. From my perspective, it's not really relevant."
"Sometimes, when the automated tests sync up or we have to debug remotely, we cannot interact directly with the device."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"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."
"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 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."
"It's definitely on the higher end of prices for this type of service."
"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."
"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
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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
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