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Appium vs Sauce Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (7th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Sauce Labs
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (12th), Test Automation Tools (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

Siddartha Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 30, 2022
It's easy to launch applications.
I rate Appium eight out of 10 for ease of setup. When I first began using the product, I would rate it as six out of 10. Appium is challenging to set up for iOS and Android, but we can manage iOS automation on the Mac from Macintosh Missions. In Missions, we need to open our Appium project on the next board and create something like a bundle diary. The bundle diary from Appium doesn't work for outputs, so it should not work for our daily routine. We need to change the bundle ID and build the iPhone application. There are two ways to set it up. You can update the Appium server for HD and need to do programming and training. It will come in after 30 seconds or more.
Savio De Souza - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 15, 2022
Enables us to have a fully functional CI/CD process while saving time and cutting down on the training required for individual testers
When we were in development, it was a bit of a pain because we have onshore and offshore development. One of our development shops is in India, and we were running tests over there. When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn't have enough licenses. That was during the core development before we even launched. We got around that by purchasing more seats, tinkering with some of the virtualization pieces, and scaling. Now we don't have that issue, because we scaled back the offshore team significantly, so when we run it overnight, there's really no effect. We come in the next morning and review the results. It doesn't affect the overall business or the offshore team. There were also some bottlenecks because of the amount of time testing takes, so we started using more tunnels and running it in parallel. That was the main issue that we faced initially, but now that it's all set up, we're good to go. We were struggling with the volume of tests, and Sauce Labs suggested we run everything in parallel. Sauce Labs isn't lacking any features that we want, and it has several we're not using, like mobile and API testing. They've also introduced a ton more features since we launched, so I don't see anything missing on their end.

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."
"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"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 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."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"Appium provides a record-and-play option, and the commands are the same as those that Selenium uses. So a person who has some exposure to Selenium will be able to write a piece of code in Appium."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It offers the single best solution for integrating deep automated browser testing in a CI/CD pipeline."
"Since this is an all-in-one testing site, we are able to take advantage of the browser OS combinations, mobile emulators and simulators, and real mobile devices. This is important to us since we have a variety of users, browsers, OS, etc."
"The most valuable feature is cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-mobile device testing."
"It provides zero maintenance browser instances."
"The most valuable feature is the cross-browser feature, it has many android and iOS devices both simulators and real devices. It's easy to integrate. I also like video recording too."
"So far, the stability has proven to be quite good."
"Running tests in parallel."
"Allows us to do JIRA Cloud and BambooHR Integration."
 

Cons

"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."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually."
"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 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 initial setup is straightforward if you have previous experience with the solution, but it can be complicated for a novice user."
"The ability to configure the memory and CPU for the test machines should be included."
"Unable to segregate reports for tests that are currently being developed, and might not be returning useful results."
"I can't remove team members that have left the organization. I can only set them as inactive. It would be really nice to clean up my data and delete them from the team management."
"As a web product QA team, we sometimes need to spot check some new child site on multiple browsers and OS(es). It was a little time consuming for us since we need to click on each of the browser/OS combinations and start a new session to test. Every sprint, with new features and child pages being added, we mostly need to do the same steps over and over again."
"Another feature that could still be improved on is more error clarity. Sometimes when running automated scripts the test will fail on the device side instead of the script and errors only show a 500 try again message instead of a detailed script that could of a been a timeout error from the code."
"Running tests in the SauceCloud can take longer than running in a local environment."
"We encountered minor issues with stability from time to time but Sauce Labs continues to make improvements."
"On a rare occasion, I will come into a ticket where a customer will have reached out to me after reaching out to Sauce Labs, saying, "Sauce Labs doesn't understand what I am going through. They are not being very helpful." So, I try to do clean up there. Outside of those extremely rare occasions, I have only had one or two of those support issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"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 price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"The solution is open-source."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"The pricing is reasonable due to the amount of diversity that they provide. However, I feel they might be more flexible to bargain based on their relationship with our organization."
"The number of concurrent VMs that Sauce Labs provides depends on your purchase license level."
"With respect to pricing, they did a bundled discount because we went with Sauce Labs for both mobile and browser. They were very competitive on pricing and provided a bundle discount for us as a larger customer."
"It could be less like pay-per-use with a lower rate."
"Their pricing is incredibly competitive."
"They could improve on the pricing because it seems pretty expensive. I'm sure it's justified, but it's expensive."
"It is an expensive tool."
"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about Appium?
Appium helps me to do as much as much as I want to.
What do you like most about Sauce Labs?
It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.
What needs improvement with Sauce Labs?
Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI, which can reduce the human effort in writing test cases. For example, in my current project, we reduced the time it took to complete user...
What is your primary use case for Sauce Labs?
I work as an automation engineer using Selenium WebDriver with Java, and API automation using Rest Assured with Java. I have also worked with Docker integration on AWS. Additionally, I have experie...
 

Comparisons

 

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Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. Sauce Labs and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.