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Appium vs Sauce Labs 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
7.1
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (7th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Sauce Labs
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (10th), Test Automation Tools (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

Abhishek-Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Has cross-platform flexibility and a record-and-play option
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 some limitations in terms of writing code using simulators and online cloud devices. I faced challenges with native based scenarios, battery turn out percentage, battery charging percentage, and memory capacity. The other challenge I faced involved codes changing from device to device. For example, the piece of code that works in iOS version 10.1 won't work in iOS version 6.0. In upcoming releases, if they can reduce some more of the dependencies like SDK, UIAutomator, etc., it would be great. That is, I'd like to see a consolidated package or bundle release that is much more user-friendly.
Joel Alonzo - PeerSpot reviewer
Metrics about testing across the company are easily accessible, and it's easy to get teams up and running
Multi-domain SSO is a big concern for us right now, especially as we've been merged into a larger company. I suddenly have teams coming from 20 different domains, and because the main master Sauce Labs account is locked down to one SSO domain, there are teams that can't run a test right now. I've heard they're working on a solution and they've been very communicative with us about it. A solution to that would help us a lot. The other issue is that when you're behind a corporate proxy and inside a corporate network, it's a nightmare in general. And the problem that we've come up against over and over again is that a lot of our network staff don't want to open up giant CIDR blocks to internal traffic. Opening it up to one endpoint which is Sauce Labs, through a little API is perfectly fine. That's one IP address and it's no big deal. But for their virtual machines they have one jump box and that jump box contains an entire CIDR block that changes each time the tunnel starts up. In other words, if every call went into one IP and that got bounced back to a load balancer or net gateway, that would help a lot too. When I go to the network team and say, "Hey, we're using a product, a piece of software, and I need an entire CIDR block opened," the first and almost eternal response to that will be "absolutely not." Getting things set up and running is always going to be a bit of a struggle within any corporate environment. Most of that is not Sauce Labs' fault, but the things I just mentioned are things they could do to help deal with that struggle.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Obviously because of automation, it reduces manual testing efforts."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"The interface is user-friendly, which is beneficial for users, even for those who are new to it."
"The automation part is extremely helpful in streamlining our processes."
"The solution is easy to use."
"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 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."
"Maintaining many environments for test is a bear. These guys make it so easy with their CI integration that you can have tests going in after a few hours."
"It provides zero maintenance browser instances."
"APPIUM for mobile testing has improved our organization by allowing us to test our website on more devices and browsers than we currently possess."
"Testing my app on cloud has really helped us with save time and resources to procure various hardware and software, and set those up."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to run concurrent automated tests up to a specified value, depending on what we are currently paying for."
"Sauce Labs is optimized for automation and integration with the major CI/CD platforms and developer tools. We have an integration with App Center that we're working on. They have a storage API that lets us retrieve APK and IPA, iOS and Android builds off the phone, so that we can continue testing with CI/CD. They integrate with Jenkins, and Jenkins is the main CI/CD."
"I have found the live test section with Sauce Labs to be extremely valuable. When you can't quite figure out why a test is failing, you can go to the live test results section within their tool and launch your test (specifying a given OS/browser, or device) manually and step through the test to see the issue more clearly, usually opening up the developer's tool console and watching the network calls and console (within Chrome) to usually find the underlying issue."
"It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%."
 

Cons

"We haven't been able to fully leverage Appium for multiple reasons. I think number one is just that the tests take a long time to run. We have had some issues around just the results themselves and how predictable they are, but those are not issues with Appium directly."
"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 challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments."
"The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"We need some bug fixes for nested elements."
"It breaks down."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"Speeds up the time it takes to run end-to-end user interface (UI) tests inside their virtual machines (VMs)."
"They should provide a JIRA integration plugin so that we can easily log issues."
"We have had some issues with the Sauce Connect Proxy on our Jenkins servers failing to start, which makes the optimal CI/CD pipeline come to a halt."
"The ability to install profiles on iOS real mobile devices should be included."
"Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI capabilities."
"User account management needs an overhauls, allowing for user groups rather than just a hierarchy structure."
"The only drawback is the speed, it will be good if we have a server in Asia too. It will be great if we can improve speed while initialization and execution."
"Sauce Labs needs to be improved in the different platforms for farm testing, like iOS and Android farm testing and farm testing web browsers.​"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"It's open source, so it's completely 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."
"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."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"The solution is open-source."
"​Now that we have an enterprise license, we no longer have to worry about minutes each month!​"
"When you reach the Enterprise licensing tier, base level being with 10 concurrent test sessions, pricing is essentially per-unit-of-concurrency thereafter with a relatively linear increase and not much benefit for "bulk"."
"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."
"Compared with other services, Sauce Labs is a bit expensive."
"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 pricing is definitely on the higher end, and there are other options that are more cost-effective."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
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 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 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...
 

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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: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.