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SmartBear TestComplete vs TFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

SmartBear TestComplete
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (7th), Regression Testing Tools (5th), Test Automation Tools (6th)
TFS
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Test Management Tools (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. SmartBear TestComplete is designed for Test Automation Tools and holds a mindshare of 6.5%, down 7.9% compared to last year.
TFS, on the other hand, focuses on Test Management Tools, holds 8.6% mindshare, down 10.7% since last year.
Test Automation Tools
Test Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 25, 2024
Used for integration automation, user-based automation, and web automation
We have applications related to power plants, and we use the solution to do 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…
Pmurki@Micron.Com Praveen - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 19, 2024
Version control is excellent and good for code review, branching, merging strategies and more
I've worked with TFS for source control and Agile project management. We also used TFS for seamless team collaboration and tracking.  I used TFS for a couple of years. Now, we use Azure DevOps. It's a wonderful tool for source control and CI/CD pipelines It's a really valuable tool for…

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 is pretty easy and it's quick to deploy."
"The product is stable for what we are currently using it for, and it is sufficient for us."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure DevOps."
"The solution is great as a record and playback tool. It also has valuable regression testing."
"SmartBear TestComplete performs some self-healing and has a feature called OCR (optical character recognition)."
"The product has many features."
"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 has a very nice interface."
"I have found almost all of the features valuable because it integrates well with your Microsoft products. If a client is using the entire Microsoft platform, then TFS would be definitely preferable. It integrates with the digital studio development environment as well."
"Complete integration with VS IDE and Office tools: This give us a possibility of high-level automation, thus minimizing human error."
"As far as queries are concerned, creating, grading, or customizing the queries as a primary requirement is very easy to do."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is project management, which includes user stories as well as task management."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"Version Control: TFS offers both the centralized “TFVC” version control technology as well as the distributed “Git” version control technology."
"Since it is a robust solution, I face no performance issues. Also, considering how well the implementation process of the solution was carried out, we never faced any issues while using the solution."
"The initial setup was straightforward: creating a new project, importing code, and setting up branches."
 

Cons

"Product is not stable enough and it crashes often."
"The pricing is the constraint."
"Increased performance with less memory and CPU usage."
"I didn't use it very heavily. One issue that I found was that there wasn't a quick way or a button to move Visual Basic scripts to TestComplete. We have a lot of such scripts in our organization, and it would be very useful to have some option to easily move these scripts. It is currently possible to convert these scripts to TestComplete, but it is not easy. I have to write some code, but everything is not available immediately."
"TestComplete gives support to do requests to a SOAP web service but has no support to do HTTP requests on Restful services."
"The artificial intelligence needs to be improved."
"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."
"At times, identifying or locating an element can be somewhat challenging. However, in a recent test update, they introduced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability. This introduction has reduced the challenges to some extent, as we can now utilize OCR if the normal method doesn't work. Nevertheless, there is still significant potential for improvement in TestComplete's ability to identify various object elements. I don't have any specific concerns to mention. I have observed significant improvements in TestComplete over the past few years, especially in its support for highly dynamic object elements used in products like Salesforce Dynamics 365. In earlier versions, there were numerous challenges, but the current version is far superior to its predecessors."
"The price could be cheaper."
"I would also like a true command prompt like Git."
"Since it is Microsoft, it is technology agnostic, thus it does not really fit into various different technologies in the organization."
"The reporting functionality is something that they should work on."
"TFS is scalable with different Microsoft tools for test management but it is not scalable with other third-party tools."
"The tool needs improvement in stability."
"We encounter issues with backups."
"Overall, I think it would be useful to have something similar where Microsoft comes up with supporting concepts of scaling Agile in TFS so that clients don't have to look for a separate tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a TestComplete 12 license."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable."
"The option we chose was around $2,000 USD."
"The product is becoming more and more expensive."
"The price is less, compared to other products, such as QTP."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"The pricing is a little above average — it could be lower."
"The license price for a physical machine is cheap, and for virtual machine, it is very expensive."
"I wouldn't say that this tool is cheap or expensive but in the middle."
"The price of the solution is cheaper than other competitors and it is a per-user license."
"I am not in a position to comment on the licensing terms, as we are talking about an enterprise arrangement."
"I was working with the engineering team, and that was not under my umbrella. From what I can remember, its license was yearly. They had the licenses on a per-user basis, and they included MTM."
"TFS is not cheap."
"TFS is more competitively priced than some other solutions."
"I would like to see TFS improve its web interface as there are some limitations with IDs and the integration behind it and with open source tools like VS Code."
"You will need to obtain server and account licenses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
60%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
The solution's pricing is too high. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing nine and a half out of ten.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
The learning curve of the solution's user interface is a little high for new users.
Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?
TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvements. In addition, TFS seems complicated to use and I don’t think it has a very fri...
What do you like most about TFS?
Microsoft's technical team is supportive.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TFS?
There are many version control options available in the market. From a costing and licensing perspective, I would rate it around six out of ten. It is not the cheapest product, but it offers good v...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Team Foundation Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Vendex KBB IT Services, Info Support, Fujitsu Consulting, TCSC, Airways New Zealand, HP
Find out what your peers are saying about SmartBear TestComplete vs. TFS and other solutions. Updated: July 2020.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.