Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Sauce Labs vs SmartBear TestComplete comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

Sauce Labs
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
12th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SmartBear TestComplete
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
8th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Regression Testing Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Test Automation Tools category, the mindshare of Sauce Labs is 3.1%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 6.1%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Test Automation 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.
Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for integration automation, user-based automation, and web automation
The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts. The solution has introduced a new feature that helps us identify objects we cannot normally identify. It gives you a fair idea of objects, resolving the object recognition issue. The solution can be used to perform different tests on different machines.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It helped to integrate our performance testing and UAT, which helped to deliver a bug free software for our customers."
"I find that the multitude of browser and OS versions are very helpful for broadening testing scope."
"APPIUM for mobile testing has improved our organization by allowing us to test our website on more devices and browsers than we currently possess."
"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."
"Testing across multiple devices and environments is now possible to do quickly and effectively."
"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."
"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 product has many features."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is regression testing tools."
"The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts."
"The solution is mainly stable."
"The solution has a very nice interface."
"The ease-of-use and quality of the overall product are above average."
"TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good."
"In TestComplete, I saw a conformed package of a tool that kept everybody in consistency. The team was able to regenerate further tests without having to manipulate more code because the record feature is great."
 

Cons

"This product is not super scalable, because you have a very specific number of VMs that you can use."
"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."
"They should provide a JIRA integration plugin so that we can easily log issues."
"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."
"Start execution time as each time a set of tests start, it will launch a new VM so it takes a bit of time."
"Sauce Labs' dashboard could be improved by adding more filters and allowing more customization options. There was one instance where the dashboard on the Sauce Labs UI didn't meet our requirements, so we had to use the Sauce Labs API to create some apps and dashboards on our own. The API endpoints could be a little more robust and customizable."
"We have found that during automated testing this can be very slow. This causes inconsistencies with the tests. It's very difficult to rely on a service when you can't be sure if a test will pass or fail the next time it runs. This means building in a lot of sync time into the tests which in turn slows them down. If this speed could be improved then the service would be much better."
"User account management needs an overhauls, allowing for user groups rather than just a hierarchy structure."
"The solution needs more training manuals or some form of online forum for learning. It needs more documentation."
"The learning curve of the solution's user interface is a little high for new users."
"Product is not stable enough and it crashes often."
"TestComplete gives support to do requests to a SOAP web service but has no support to do HTTP requests on Restful services."
"What is currently missing from this solution is better support for mobile testing."
"We were testing handheld barcode scanners running WindowsCE with many menus of warehouse functions, and our biggest problem was the timing between input and responses."
"The artificial intelligence needs to be improved."
"The test object repository needs to be improved. The hierarchy and the way we identify the objects in different applications, irrespective of technology, needs adjustments. The located and test objects are not as flexible compared to other commercial tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for a specific number of VMs."
"Compared with other services, Sauce Labs is a bit expensive."
"Their pricing is incredibly competitive."
"Go ahead please. Try it at a smaller scale."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
"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."
"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."
"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."
"The solution's licensing cost has increased because it has moved to some new SLM-based licenses."
"The pricing is a little above average — it could be lower."
"It is approximately $6,000 a year."
"Buy modules on demand. If you have a four-person team and they will each automate tests only 25% of the time, it's better to buy a floating licence and share the tool during the work day."
"The licensing costs are in the range of $1,000 to $3,000."
"We have a TestComplete 12 license."
"The solution is around $1500. Some are perpetual licenses, and some get a yearly report card."
"The product is becoming more and more expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Test Automation Tools solutions are best for your needs.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
7%
 

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...
What do you like most about SmartBear TestComplete?
TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SmartBear TestComplete?
I don't know much about the pricing, however, I think it's cheaper.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
The recording function, when using Python, could be improved, as it does not work well in recording testing.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sauce Labs vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.