HeadSpin vs Sauce Labs comparison

HeadSpin and Sauce Labs are both solutions in the Functional Testing Tools category. HeadSpin is ranked #29, while Sauce Labs is ranked #12 with an average rating of 6.0. HeadSpin holds a 0.6% mindshare in FT, compared to Sauce Labs’s 6.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of HeadSpin users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Sauce Labs users who would recommend it.

HeadSpin

Read 6 HeadSpin reviews

596 Views
340 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Sauce Labs

Read 113 Sauce Labs reviews

4,445 Views
3,481 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

HeadSpin

Sauce Labs

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Sauce Labs and HeadSpin are leading players in the automated testing tools market. Sauce Labs appears to have the upper hand due to its more responsive customer service and robust cloud support options.

Features: Sauce Labs offers advantages like testing video recording, snapshots, and running tests in parallel. It also supports many devices and platforms, enhancing its utility with responsive and useful debugging tools like video playback. HeadSpin excels in delivering detailed performance metrics and integrates seamlessly with automation tools, with a focus on performance testing and connected intelligence applications.

Room for Improvement: Sauce Labs can improve its documentation clarity, support speed, and address latency issues. In contrast, HeadSpin could benefit from enhancements in user experience and reduced latency with remote devices. Introducing features like code coverage and adding diverse reporting would also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sauce Labs provides consistent customer service throughout its seamless product evaluation and deployment, setting a high standard in cloud support. HeadSpin, however, still needs to address latency issues and improve its support services as indicated in user reviews.

Pricing and ROI: Sauce Labs is considered slightly expensive but offers flexible licensing models which justify its cost by reducing test time and increasing confidence in automation. HeadSpin, while also costly, offers competitive pricing with its comprehensive service, significantly boosting productivity with efficient release cycles.

To learn more, read our detailed HeadSpin vs. Sauce Labs Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin vs. Sauce Labs

January 2025

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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

HeadSpin

Ranking in Functional Testing Tools

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Mobile APM (7th), Mobile App Testing Tools (10th)

Sauce Labs

Ranking in Functional Testing Tools

12th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

113

Ranking in other categories

Test Automation Tools (16th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Functional Testing Tools category, the mindshare of HeadSpin is 0.6%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sauce Labs is 6.8%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Functional Testing Tools

Featured Reviews

Abhishek-Mehta

Associate Vice President at Onnivation

An advanced platform that provides visibility into the performance in the real world and enables us to test AV content

There is definitely room for improvement in terms of marketing. Marketing is something that is not that great. If you look at some of the other companies in the space, they have a lot of published case studies and tested models. They make a lot of noise. They have got some of their best customers talking about them, which is where HeadSpin needs to work. They should automate their onboarding. A lot of things are still manual. They can create a video assistant or something like that to completely automate the entire process. There is a great scope to improve professional services. The time to deploy is quite long. They can increase and improve the scope of their professional services and set up automation through scripts. They do it at this stage, but they're very expensive. I would love to see them come up with project-based costing for companies that are startups or low on funds. Apart from these, they have been on top of the game in terms of features. I can't think of any other new set of features at this point in time because they're already on top in terms of innovation.

Read full review

Joel Alonzo

Product Manager - Data & APIs at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup of HeadSpin was very easy and user-friendly. It was easy to configure and write a script."

"The most valuable feature is that this is the first connected intelligence all-in-one platform."

"It has an interesting feature called AV box testing. A lot of companies that are in the OTT segment don't really understand what their streaming is like. They can't test for streaming quality. There are restrictions where you cannot simulate live streaming. For example, on Netflix, you can't simulate how a movie is being streamed on a remote device. That's why HeadSpin has got this AV box testing feature. It is a patented feature. They send an AV box to your location, and you can test live streaming, which is something that no other company does."

"The most valuable feature of HeadSpin it's the integration with other solutions. It is great. I can search for an element or do a quick debugging on the application right on HeadSpin. It's very useful."

"The technical support is really helpful because we can set up direct calls with them if we want to. We can use Zoom or Google Meet to interact with them directly, and if there is an issue in our system, they will help us by reproducing the issue in their machines and trying to figure out a solution. The support is really smooth, and we like that they're very supportive."

"The most valuable features of the product are the performance parameters it gives us."

"Supplying devices to a testing team of possibly close to one thousand testers and developers is a great undertaking but Sauce Labs has made this very easy and a welcomed solution."

"The insights section provides a great overall state of the automation suite and can identify trends relatively quickly. If we see a dip in our passing rate over time, we can look at what changed when the test started failing to find the root cause rather than doing a quick fix to find that the test fails a short time later."

"With only a few clicks, it gives us the availability to use any browser and OS combination whenever we want."

"From an infrastructure support perspective, the number of VMs, browsers installations and versions that we would be maintaining without Sauce Labs would be a lot. This includes not only the infrastructure costs, but also the maintenance costs and people's time. The labor cost associated with maintaining all of that would be considerably high. In terms of efficiency, having concurrent VMs with various browser combinations available has allowed us to run multiple executions by all our teams."

"I find that the multitude of browser and OS versions are very helpful for broadening testing scope."

"It offers the single best solution for integrating deep automated browser testing in a CI/CD pipeline."

"The solution they provide is very robust. We can quickly connect to their environment with the hub URL. They have a URL that has the entire grid of desktops, web browsers, and mobile devices. They also provide real devices, so you just provide the URL and test your application."

"Before implementing Sauce Labs, we tested physical devices that team members had to share. It was more feasible when we were all located in one office, but we couldn't leverage our offshore capacity. With this solution, we can do everything remotely, which is essential now that most of us work from home."

More Sauce Labs pros

Cons

"Support and pricing could be improved."

"Sometimes, devices go offline and some features are not functioning on some devices, specifically on iOS."

"If you want to do some testing or check the devices manually or check the application in a particular device manually, it is really laggy. That's a disappointment because sometimes we would like to do manual testing when our local devices are not available."

"They should automate their onboarding. A lot of things are still manual. They can create a video assistant or something like that to completely automate the entire process."

"HeadSpin could improve on the user interface because it is very poor. The checks that are done on the iOS devices are very difficult, but for Android, it runs great. For all iOS devices, the user interface and how it interacts with the device are very poor."

"HeadSpin needs to improve the hardware. With the mobile, the battery life reduces and must be continuously charged."

"I may not know what should be improved on the platform, but I think it could offer a greater variety of testing solutions. I know there might be competing solutions that cover more things I'm unaware of, and it could expand a bit more. We've done a lot of automated testing scenarios, and that's all the rage these days, so I think Sauce Labs could look at potential ways to improve and cover other scenarios."

"Speeds up the time it takes to run end-to-end user interface (UI) tests inside their virtual machines (VMs)."

"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."

"They could improve the platform's customer support services."

"Start execution time as each time a set of tests start, it will launch a new VM so it takes a bit of time."

"There have been various times throughout the last month or so where the service has gone down during business hours."

"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."

"We encountered minor issues with stability from time to time but Sauce Labs continues to make improvements."

More Sauce Labs cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe the licensing cost is cheap because it's a total solution, hardware, license and software."

"It has a yearly license. There is no other option. It is expensive. There are a lot of other cheaper players in the market, but it is like a Mercedes. You pay an extra premium for it, but you get the benefits. I would love to see them come up with project-based costing. Companies that are low on funds or new-age can do with pricing that is easily digestible. They can give them a pricing model for three months. They can provide a startup package."

"It's not cheap, but there are a few different packages and different prices for enterprises with different product versions."

"We have a yearly license for 16 devices."

"Cost-wise, it's decent. If you have to get the base version out of it, it's the best solution to go with. As compared to other cloud service providers, the pricing of Sauce Labs is decent."

"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"."

"Compared with other services, Sauce Labs is a bit expensive."

"Go ahead please. Try it at a smaller scale."

"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."

"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."

"Now that we have an enterprise license, we no longer have to worry about minutes each month!"

"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."

More Sauce Labs pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Sauce Labs?

It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.

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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...

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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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Comparisons

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Compared 55% of the time

BrowserStack vs HeadSpin

Compared 31% of the time

Kobiton Mobile Device Testing vs HeadSpin

Compared 15% of the time

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BrowserStack vs Sauce Labs

Compared 46% of the time

Perfecto vs Sauce Labs

Compared 23% of the time

LambdaTest vs Sauce Labs

Compared 15% of the time

Bitbar vs Sauce Labs

Compared 3% of the time

Katalon Studio vs Sauce Labs

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin

February 2025

Download HeadSpin product report

Buyer's Guide

Sauce Labs

January 2025

Download Sauce Labs product report

Overview

Headspin is a data science-driven Mobile APM platform that leverages an AI platform to combine global device infrastructure, test automation, machine learning-driven performance, and quality of experience analytics. HeadSpin was founded to answer the demand for a global testing, performance monitoring, and quality of experience (QoE) management platform to assist businesses in ensuring optimal digital experiences across mobile, audio, online, and video delivery channels.

Headspin facilitates seamless collaboration between product managers, SREs, developers, QA/release engineers, and support staff to:

Quicken development times using intelligent automation in test and production.
Optimize digital performance across devices, networks, and apps.
Automate insights discovery with practical, context-aware AI and analytics.

Headspin Features

Headspin has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Global device infrastructure allows end-to-end monitoring and testing with thousands of devices in numerous locations on real carrier and WiFi networks around the world. SDK is not required.
Test automation and APIs integrate into CI/CD workflows to enable functional and performance testing pre and post release. Support for all testing frameworks.
Performance, QoE, and machine learning automatically expose issues and points to underlying root causes across all layers of the stack, from quantifying audio/video quality of experience to code and packet visibility.
Insights-to-actions delivers regression and aggregation insights throughout the digital experience lifecycle. These insights take you from planning and development to troubleticketing and operations. Trending, alerts, and analytics.

More features include:

Hosted Device Cloud
On-prem Device Appliance
Performance & Experience Analytics
Professional Services & Support
Education, Certification & Training

Headspin Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Headspin. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Use data science to identify problems and root cause analysis

Empower QA and DevOps teams with data science insights and test automation

Global teams can work together using remote access

Capture performance and UX issues

Reviews from Real Users

Headspin stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its easy setup, scalability, and robust customer support. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Abhishek M., Associate Vice President at Onnivation, notes, “A lot of companies that are using other solutions do not get access to the kind of metrics that HeadSpin captures…HeadSpin is highly advanced. It has got all the performance structures to provide visibility into how my app is performing in the real world. It also helps to identify the gaps.”

Shiba S., Automation Engineer at GlobalLogic India, writes, “The technical support is really helpful because we can set up direct calls with them if we want to…They support multiple devices. Plus, they support distribution testing.”

HeadSpin

Sauce Labs is a functional testing tool that ensures your apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, OS, and device. The solution allows you to automate functional testing on multiple operating systems and browsers, emulating the way that a user would use the website. With Sauce Labs, you can also run tests on various operating system and browser combinations in parallel, reducing the amount of time to get results. The Sauce Labs solution provides enterprise-grade security, scalability, and reliability.

Sauce Labs Features

Sauce Labs has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Automated cross-browser testing
Mobile testing
Secure tunneling protocol
Usage reporting
Enterprise security
Provisioning
Centralized user account management
Access controls
Support for Selenium, Appium, and JUnit Testing

Sauce Labs Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Sauce Labs. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Speed up development time: The solution makes it possible for you to test web and mobile apps in parallel and accelerate your testing time by up to 10x or more. Using Sauce Labs, you can increase developer productivity because your teams will be able to spend less time with test maintenance and debug faster.

No worrying about infrastructure: With Sauce Labs, you don’t have to buy or maintain more servers or mobile devices. You also don’t need to worry about updating browsers or VM licenses. Sauce Labs allows you to easily scale your tests with parallelization to speed up test cycles and boost capacity on their reliable cloud.

Run tests securely: The solution enables you to securely run your scripts and access your data and files from behind your firewall. Sauce Labs generates single-use VMs for every test and destroys them immediately afterwards so your data always remains secure.

Easy integration for your CI systems: Sauce Labs automated testing platform integrates with Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft VSTS, and others so you can test as fast as you develop. In addition, you can share results instantly by using the solution’s simple plugins.

Reviews from Real Users

Sauce Labs is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It has valuable features that include error logging, helpful dashboards, and its browser.

Joel A., Product Manager - Data & APIs at a marketing services firm, says, "The error logging is very robust. If we run a test through Sauce Labs and there's some sort of issue, a log will appear on the screen. Log messages are usually heinous and horrible... Sauce Labs is incredibly good at saying things like, 'Hey, here is the exact issue. Fix this and you can run the test.' That helps in getting things up and running and executing the way they should."

Savio D., Sr. IT Architect at a healthcare company, mentions, "Sauce Labs' dashboards contain multiple useful metrics in one place. Everything is represented to us visually on the dashboard, which helps us understand where to focus our attention, what the issues are, and what we need to resolve."

PeerSpot reviewer, Rob L., Director of Quality Assurance - Shared Service at a financial services firm, writes, “The most valuable feature for us is the browser. The most critical thing is that this software aligns with our Agile and DevOps way of doing things. It integrates with kickoff scripts through DevOps.”

Sauce Labs

Sample Customers

Zynga, Tinder, Pinterest, Akamai, Microsoft, Airbnb, Jam City, TMobile, Mozilla, CNN, Cognizant, Yahoo!, ebay, Quora, Walmart, Kohls, Telstra

Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.

Buyer's Guide

HeadSpin vs. Sauce Labs

January 2025

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