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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
15th
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 March 2025, in the Test Automation Tools category, the mindshare of Sauce Labs is 3.0%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 6.0%, down from 7.5% 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 custom capabilities that can be provided to Sauce Labs VMs during automated testing sessions are a valuable option for experimental or niche testing."
"Testing my app on cloud has really helped us with save time and resources to procure various hardware and software, and set those up."
"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 most valuable feature is cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-mobile device testing."
"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."
"It runs on the cloud, so you don't have physical setups to run all of this."
"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."
"Running tests in parallel."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is regression testing tools."
"This company offers end-to-end capabilities for test suite creation and execution. One feature that I particularly appreciate is the tagging system. Tags are highly valuable, as they allow you to assign tags to your test cases. When there's an impact in a specific area, you can search for and run all test cases associated with that tag. I find this functionality very useful."
"TestComplete fits almost perfectly with a large amount of stacks, such as Delphi, C#, Java and web applications."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure DevOps."
"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."
"The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts."
"The most valuable features are the desktop and mobile modules."
 

Cons

"An image comparison would be a nice feature to include in the Sauce Labs product."
"Every time that we run scenarios where we need to discover the geolocation of our customers, by default it shows as Palo Alto, California. That's a problem for us and we need a workaround for those cases... It would be helpful if we could enter a latitude and longitude into Sauce Labs configuration and say, "When you run a virtual Chrome device or an iPhone, make this your default location. Then, provide me that device so I can run my scenarios," because we have stores in different regions across the United States."
"We encountered minor issues with stability from time to time but Sauce Labs continues to make improvements."
"Running tests in the SauceCloud can take longer than running in a local environment."
"User account management needs an overhauls, allowing for user groups rather than just a hierarchy structure."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see improved network connectivity and it should allow playback for native apps."
"The artificial intelligence needs to be improved."
"One notable drawback is the absence of native integration with Git."
"The solution needs to extend the possibilities so that we can test on other operating systems, platforms and publications for Android as well as iOS."
"It is very hard to read the test log generated by TestComplete Executor if the log file is very big. TestComplete Executor is a small tool for just running the TestComplete test framework (not for developing)."
"Stability issues occurred only when connecting to the SourceSafe. Sometimes, after getting the latest version, the tool hangs and it should be reopened in order to recover."
"Right now, when you buy the solution, you need to pay for one solution. You receive one set up and you install it and it's just in that one machine. It would be ideal if they could offer one subscription where you can connect to different machines with a group subscription."
"The licensing costs are a little bit high and should be reduced."
"Product is not stable enough and it crashes often."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an enterprise account; it has worked great for our needs."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
"It is an expensive tool."
"We pay for a specific number of VMs."
"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."
"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"."
"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."
"The solution is around $1500. Some are perpetual licenses, and some get a yearly report card."
"SmartBear TestComplete is an expensive tool."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"The license price for a physical machine is cheap, and for virtual machine, it is very expensive."
"It costs a few hundred per year, but I am not sure. It is not at all expensive as compared to other tools."
"Overall, for us, the cost of the TestComplete platform and the three extra modules is around $8,000."
"The licensing costs are in the range of $1,000 to $3,000."
"It comes with a high cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
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: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.