What is our primary use case?
We use it for automation testing of our e-commerce product. We also have some apps that use React Native and they deploy to mobile devices. We also do responsive mobile testing. That means we test anything that hits a website with a browser, or on a phone through React Native, through Sauce Labs.
We also use their VMs and their video recordings.
We use the automation testing and the ability to run it against many device configurations. It's very convenient.
How has it helped my organization?
Infrastructure provisioning is a big thing. The whole point of having this expensive license for Sauce Labs is so that we don't have to maintain multiple versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. We don't have to maintain our own device farms or our own servers, and that means no security patching, compliance, or auditing. A whole bunch of infrastructure headaches are offloaded to Sauce Labs.
Using it every day, and having all the manual QAs get some experience working with it, has saved us multiple person-hours. Just having an automated testing solution, Sauce notwithstanding, means an army doesn't have to sit there and click, click, click, multiple times, every time we do a release, to test the same old things and make sure the same old features still work. Having Sauce Labs on our side, we can actually do all of that at scale with the automation.
The number of testing environments is definitely mission-critical because it plays a part in a release. We run these automations so that we are able to catch issues and so that a customer does not experience issues. And not having to do manual QA frees people up to do exploratory testing. It frees them up to use their intuition and domain knowledge to find bugs that have come in from new features and that might affect old features. It's absolutely essential that we have Sauce Labs. There's no way we could accomplish releases at our current rapid cadence without it.
We also run tests in parallel. It would take way too long to do it one by one. It saves us tens, hundreds, even thousands of hours. And Sauce Labs has reports on that, telling you if you're maximizing your concurrency and whether your licensing is affected by concurrency units, which is great. Knowing that we can run tests in parallel means we can focus on the tests themselves and the quality of the tests. We don't want to create duplicate tests because that would increase test maintenance. Running them in parallel means that we're getting the most for our CPU buck.
What is most valuable?
We send over a configuration object in JSON and it's very convenient to be able to do it that way.
Also, 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, install them on the phone, so that we can continue testing. They integrate well with Jenkins.
It's super-important that the solution is optimized for integrating with these major CI/CD platforms and tools because at the manager level, they want integrations out-of-the-box. They want to reduce internal tooling or internal custom stuff.
We use the browser/OS combinations, mobile emulators, and real mobile devices. It's huge having multiple types of testing available in a single platform. It's definitely a competitive differentiator. For example, Microsoft has its own test automation through App Center and there's also BrowserStack and other competitors. It's very important to be able to tell the decision-maker, "Hey, Sauce Labs already has it, so don't worry about it."
They also have a huge number of browser OS combinations, mobile emulators, and real mobile devices. The solution covers a ton of combinations, probably almost any combination you would encounter when a custom reports a bug. That is great for QA to be able to reproduce that issue on that exact same device.
Sauce Labs maintains physical devices in their data center. They go out and buy the device and provision it for you when you have a real-device contract and licensing, and that's also huge. You're on a physical device.
And for the mobile emulation, which is great as well, they not only have Apple devices, but different iOS versions, which is a huge feature, including different Safari versions on different macOS versions and different Windows versions. More often, you only have a subset of what Sauce Labs offers because people will be mostly using cutting-edge stuff or people might be using mostly legacy. But Sauce Labs runs the gamut and they have all kinds of devices. You'll run out of combinations that are relevant to you before you run every single combination that Sauce Labs has.
I'm pretty happy with the areas of the product that I've been using. The Appium part, even though Appium feels pretty new, is still supported. They support Selenium 4 as well as several other test frameworks, such as Cypress, XCUITest, Puppeteer, and Espresso. Sauce Labs also has artificial intelligence, the AutonomIQ test framework. With AutonomIQ you can have manual QA where you submit an Excel file and then it just automatically creates a test. That's a killer feature.
They offer so many things that we haven't even tried yet, like performance testing and courtesy Docker containers. They are continually updating the documentation. They have performance testing and visual testing. They even acquired Backtrace, which is some sort of error monitoring solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the Sauce Labs solution for about a year and a half. Our company has been using it since 2016.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any issues. Sauce Labs has been more reliable than we have.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is connected to the pricing. The solution is scalable if you have the money to scale. It's based on what they call concurrency units, and they can get expensive.
We have about a dozen users of the solution. They are mostly involved in test automation, SDET.
How are customer service and support?
Support is great, including the support ticketing. Every time I've had a support ticket, they have replied. If they need to, they escalate it. They'll answer technical questions about things like IP whitelisting, and they'll take a look at the screenshots we provide or links to tests that are failing. Their support is empowered to really probe and ask questions.
We haven't used their expertise to help integrate automated testing into our CI/CD pipeline. We have generally solved every issue that we've encountered so far, but they do offer software architecture assistance. It's good to have someone at the software level, and not just sales or product support. If I say I'm having a development issue, it's good to be able to talk at that level, using the jargon.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
When I came in, the solution was already set up. Tweaking it has been easy.
One of the great things about it is that there's no maintenance. We just throw a JSON content object over and then they take over from there.
What was our ROI?
I can't speak about metrics, but we're able to run automation tests in parallel and that helps with releases. It's definitely a critical part of the whole process. And even moving forward to cloud, it's definitely a big part.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
They could improve on the pricing because it seems pretty expensive. I'm sure it's justified, but it's expensive.
For some of the features we aren't using yet, I believe we do need to add new licenses, but for others, we just need to try them out. We just need to have the bandwidth and time.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We use other products for front-end testing but there's no significant reason we couldn't do it with Sauce Labs. It's not lacking in that solution. We use other tools mostly due to dev team mindset. They prefer something more local to their use and something they're familiar with. If we were to push the QA side to do performance testing through Sauce Labs, they'd be open to it.
It's not only Sauce Labs, as a vendor, that offers automation, but there's BrowserStack and others that also offer it. But using Sauce Labs has been great.
What other advice do I have?
Definitely try it out. They are very friendly about giving you trials and then following up with monthly syncs. They'll connect you with a sales rep, an engineering-type salesperson, and you can have monthly chats with them. They'll keep you updated about their product updates. It's free to try it. Once you try it, I think you'll see the benefits.
Latency due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution hasn't been a concern at all. It runs automatically and sometimes it runs during off-hours, so any latency is not a big deal for us. For flaky tests we use Ruby, which has a rescue retry pattern that we use a lot and that's really helped. Test flakiness is just a reality of test automation and we have good workarounds for it. So cloud latency in Sauce Labs hasn't been an issue.
We've been pretty happy with Sauce Labs. I'd probably have to think pretty hard about what it is lacking. It's been working for us and whatever we throw at it, including Appium, mobile device simulation testing, and being able to support multiple apps. The automation testing has been great. The SC (Sauce Connect) Proxy is pretty friendly. There are the VMs and the video recording. Overall, we've been pretty happy with it. I'd be hard-pressed to find a glaring issue that hasn't been addressed.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.