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Sauce Labs vs Selenium HQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.0
Sauce Labs boosts ROI by optimizing release cycles, reducing costs, enhancing test efficiency, and enabling broader device testing.
Sentiment score
7.7
Selenium HQ offers substantial ROI with time savings, efficiency in testing, and no licensing fees, despite initial learning investment.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.0
Sauce Labs' customer service is praised for responsiveness, friendliness, and efficiency, with most users highly satisfied despite occasional delays.
Sentiment score
6.2
Selenium HQ relies on community support and online forums for user assistance and troubleshooting rather than official services.
I have not had the need to escalate questions to Selenium HQ tech support recently, as open community support is widely available and has been sufficient for our needs.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
Sauce Labs is scalable but faces challenges with cost, VM limitations, outages, and requires more data centers for extensive scaling.
Sentiment score
7.5
Selenium HQ generally scales well, with successful implementations in various environments, though challenges can arise due to technical demands.
We can execute thousands of test cases weekly, and our automation coverage using Selenium HQ is approximately eighty-five percent.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Sauce Labs offers stable, reliable cloud testing with occasional issues, but improvements and timely support enhance user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.2
Selenium HQ's stability varies, with stable use reported widely, though issues arise, especially with specific browsers and updates.
 

Room For Improvement

Users want clearer documentation, faster processing, better reports, improved integrations, more device coverage, accurate logging, and responsive support.
Selenium HQ needs better IE support, cross-browser stability, user-friendly interface, app support, and enhanced documentation for improved usability.
An automatic update mechanism for Selenium HQ would be beneficial, eliminating the need for manual downloads and updates of browser drivers when new versions are released.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Sauce Labs pricing flexible but costly, recommending starting small and scaling to manage costs effectively.
Selenium HQ is free and appealing to enterprises, though it may incur indirect costs like maintenance and expertise.
 

Valuable Features

Sauce Labs offers cross-browser compatibility, video recording, and parallel test execution for scalable testing across multiple platforms and devices.
Selenium HQ is open-source, supports multiple languages, and offers cross-browser compatibility with extensive integration and scalability features.
New features in Selenium HQ make object identification easier without reliance on XPath and CSS.
 

Categories and Ranking

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 (15th)
Selenium HQ
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Regression Testing Tools (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Functional Testing Tools category, the mindshare of Sauce Labs is 5.9%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Selenium HQ is 3.7%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Functional Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Sujata Sujata Ghadage - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation in testing processes sees improvement with multi-browser support and easier website interactions
Selenium HQ could improve by including a robust reporting framework, eliminating the need for external frameworks. The tool could simplify object identification, enabling users to generate XPaths without requiring detailed DOM understanding. Additionally, an automatic update mechanism for Selenium HQ would be beneficial, eliminating the need for manual downloads and updates of browser drivers when new versions are released.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
How do I choose between Selenium HQ and Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence?
Selenium HQ’s biggest advantage is that it is customizable. Its other most valuable feature is that the driver interface is really helpful and user-friendly; Selenium HQ makes it easy to navigate t...
What do you like most about Selenium HQ?
Selenium's open-source nature is a key advantage. Its extensive support for diverse web technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Selenium HQ?
Selenium is easy to install and mostly free, so there's no need for a license. This lack of costs makes it an attractive option.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SeleniumHQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, experitest, Tricentis GmbH, SmartBear Software
Find out what your peers are saying about Sauce Labs vs. Selenium HQ and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.