Sauce Labs Reviews

We use Sauce Labs for mostly our automated testing on cross-browser and emulator devices. Our team mainly focuses on web product testing so using a third party vendor to help with the external resouces is a must. There are many cases that we need to run our test on multiple browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge etc. Sauce Labs has all the options for us. Of course, because our products are mostly web based, we need to ensure the cross-browser testing for every release cycle. Instead of doing it manually on many real devices, we use Sauce Labs since they provide many emulator devices.

Sauce Labs has been helping us a lot in reducing the number of manual testing. By moving most of our test to the cloud and not running on the EC2 instance, we not only save time for the service but also the maintenance for the external servers. Sauce Labs is the best out there. They beat their competitors because of its price, customer support, and an amazing forum where you can ask and get answered really quickly. They never stop expanding. Whenever we have a new update for any browser, devices, etc. they make sure it will be in their devices and browsers farm so users can use it immediately.

Live device testing. As we all know, It's really hard and challenging to find/purchase many real devices to test because it will be costly and not all the team can be able to purchase all of the devices out there. We used to have a lot of real devices under our labs. However, it is really time-consuming to maintain those devices and make sure they are up to date with the testing requirements. Sauce Labs knows that and already has a solution for their live device testing which allows us to test our app on the actual devices out there and see the real result.

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. We would like to see if Sauce Labs can be able to open multiple different browsers on the same website at the same time, just by 1 click. It will reduce a lot of time for manually click and change the devices/OS combination.

2+ years.

We rarely had any downtime with Saucelabs, except sometimes our tests cannot connect through the tunnel. It's not always but once in a while and with some random tests only. Their support is really great, they always help us to diagnose and find the root cause of the problem. 

The performance is great, we never had any slowness or trouble with running our tests.

Amazing! They are very quick in response and very throughout. They even go way beyond to help troubleshoot our code and give the coding example to help with all the questions that we had.

We did use another third party vendor for cloud testing. However, their price increased a lot, and their support was a little slower than Sauce Labs. That's why we switched.

It was very easy. They have a wiki and a GitHub repo with all of the codes for every programming language. We can either use their template page or inherit it to our use cases.

We developed our test framework based on Sauce Labs in-house. There was no other vendor team.

We have a team that manages all the licenses, and they share the pool with the rest of us. However, we haven't had any problem of running out of concurrent devices/connection because we agree to not running many test in parallel at the same time.

There are only two big companies in this field and since we were moving away from the other one, we obviously did not consider any other options.

If you are looking for a cloud devices testing provider, look no further. They will beat their competitors on price, support, and a lot more. 

The abundance of device, platform, and browser combinations/versions that can be used in parallel.

Test engineers can now run more tests without bogging down the power of their PC which enables them to multitask, getting more work done.

Unable to segregate reports for tests that are currently being developed, and might not be returning useful results.

One year.

Setting up infrastructure was challenging, but worth the effort.

No.

No.

Very positive. From the sales reps to the customer success reps, Sauce Labs is truly dedicated to ensuring an outstanding experience.

Good.

Previously, we had attempted to create our own, on-premise, device grids. There were many difficulties, and in the end, there were cost savings with outsourcing this.

Opening the network securely was challenging, but once established, it was very easy to start executing automated tests through the proxy.

We worked closely with Sauce Labs' support and technical teams to implement the solution properly in-house.

A lot.

Do your homework.

Yes, I won't name them, but we looked at two other products of a similar nature.

The APIs that are offered play a huge role in reporting and metrics for us. Figuring out how to utilize them can be of a tremendous value add to any organization making data-driven decisions.

Our CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) QA Pipeline interacts with Sauce Labs when it goes to run the necessary automated tests. Our automated tests exist for normal web browser tests (we specify to run on the latest Chrome version, on Mac OS) as well as mobile tests where are mobile tests run on various Android and iOS devices to verify that our apps are working properly on multiple systems. We use a 30 VM (Virtual Machine) farm from Sauce Labs, which gives us enough VM's to get through all our tests in a very reasonable amount of time.

I use it to maintain my own VM (Virtual Machine) farm of 25 VMs. The admin time I had to spend on maintenance and upkeep was a few hours per week, coupled with the fact that the up-time on the VMs was probably somewhere around 75% due to issues coming up in off-hours when I wasn't available to due maintenance/fixes/repairs. When I finally moved over to Sauce Labs, all this burden of doing the management was uplifted off my shoulders, and the up-time is nearly 100% for Sauce Labs VMs. On top of that, we can specify from an abundance of device types, OS's, browser versions, etc. when running our tests. Furthermore, the analytics side of things within Sauce Labs has drastically improved over the years and you can dive into your test results (pass/fail) to get a better understanding of how things are working over a period of time. Overall, Sauce Labs has provided us with a VM farm that is virtually always up and running and has taken the burden off of us/myself of maintaining the VM farm.

I have found the live test section with Sauce Labs to be extremely valuable. When you can't quite figure out why a test is failing, you can go to the live test results section within their tool and launch your test (specifying a given OS/browser, or device) manually and step through the test to see the issue more clearly, usually opening up the developer's tool console and watching the network calls and console (within Chrome) to usually find the underlying issue.

I also frequently use the insights section within the tool, to analyze trends of the pass/fail rate of our tests, so I can see what suites of ours are more failure-prone than others, etc. The tool allows you to filter up to the last 30 days' worth of data, along with many other filter options (OS type, tag, build, etc.) so you can really produce insights into your tests.

Overall, I think Sauce Labs provides us with a valuable tool and resource. As far as what could be improved, I would say the overall test execution time. Some of the calls take a bit longer than I expect, for example in web browser tests; while the execution time isn't obnoxious, it could be improved so that overall tests/test suites finish faster.

Within the insights section of the Sauce Labs tool, I think it would be nice if you could go back farther than 30 days worth of data. I like all the custom filters available, but being able to go back say 90 days (or more) would show more statistics on our data/test results.

In the next release, I'd like to see continual new additions of OS's. This area is usually pretty up-to-date, please keep at it!

Five plus years.

Very good, up-time is near 100%.

Very good, you can add Vs if necessary.

We've only usually contacted customer service (our account manager) to add VMs, it's been seamless and pleasant.

Manually maintained my own VM farm. We switched to Sauce Labs as the cost/time to maintain my own VM farm was too high.

Straightforward and easy, with good instructions in their knowledge base.

In-house.

I'd say it definitely provides a good ROI, vs maintaining your own VM farm.

The cost is worth it. Start with a VM farm that you think suits your needs, and then add/subtract VM's if necessary.

We use Sauce Labs for the following:

- Executing automated functional tests across multiple applications in a combination of about 5 browsers/os. These include IE11, Safari (latest), Edge (latest), Firefox (latest) and Chrome (latest).

- Running manual exploratory testing across the same browser mentioned above to get a hands-on view of the application running in each of the environments.

- We use the screenshots and videos to share the bugs or issues found with the teams to assist in the resolution of the bugs.

Sauce Labs has improved the testing side of our organization in the following ways:

Sauce Labs runs a huge number of browser and operating system combinations it allows our teams to worry more about testing our applications than maintaining a combination of browser and os. Either through the Selenium grid or running the browsers locally. In essence, it allows our testers to concentrate on testing the application and not worrying about the infrastructure. It also allows us to target new browsers without the required setup of the new browser.

As stated earlier we use Sauce Labs for a combination of automated testing and manual testing. Therefore the most useful features are the ability to run the functional automated tests via Sauce Labs tunnels which allows access to applications in our internal network. The second most useful feature is the manual side. This allows our testers to quickly identify issues with the look and feel of our apps in the different browsers we support.  I have not had a requirement for mobile testing so cannot advise on that side.

We have used Sauce Labs extensively for the last 5 years across automated and manual testing and have found some problems during this time. Firstly as we use Sauce Labs to connect the tunnel to connect to apps in our internal network 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.

Approximately 5 years.

The pricing is clear on the site - I would say it is more expensive than some alternatives.

It's ability to test on multiple browsers and OS combinations is invaluable as a QA tool. However, it's CI integration with Jenkins is why we were able to make a case to include this product in our ATDD process.

This has helped greatly as our organization switches from a waterfall method to an Agile method of software development. The transition is difficult and hectic at times, as it requires a big change in the way we think about, and treat the development process. Sauce Labs, which blends seamlessly into Agile and ATDD processes, has made the process much smoother from a QA perspective.

Rarely, some tests fail, seemingly without cause, and will succeed again the next time we run the tests. This isn't a behavior we saw when testing locally.

I've been working in QA for about 6 months now, and began using Sauce Labs about 3 months ago.

We have not deployed yet, but we see no signs of issues in the future.

None so far.

I have yet to engage their customer service directly, but the support pages are full of valuable information. Maybe it could use better organization, but it's there..

We have a Sauce Labs admin at my company who deals with tech support, I have had no experience with them. However, after an initial hiccup when they were setting up tunnels so that we could test internal apps, I have seen no technical problems.

I am new to this QA position and after doing research, Sauce Labs was my first choice.

As a brand new hire, I cannot speak to how easily a seasoned QA role would see initial setup. I was learning Selenium while trying to setup Sauce Labs, and the materials were not so straight forward as to make the process easy for someone so new. It took me a few weeks to really get the hang of things, but I'm confident initial setup on a new project would be simple the next time.

I am a user in my company, I had no interaction with the vender.

In my previous company, we used Sauce Labs to enable the team to test with various operating systems and browsers without having to own each of them. 

Their product gave us the ability to run multiple teams of testers across the various platforms that would be used by our customers without having to physically have the infrastructure in place. This drive our movement into continuous integration and the ability to test earlier in the cycle.

No

over a year

No. It was very easy to install and implement from day one. 

No

No

Customer service from the initial query to sauce labs to the product evaluation to contract negotiations to purchase and installation was seamless. They are so accommodating and easy to work with and this allowed us to go from initial discussion to implementation in what I would consider one of the shortest timeframes I've seen with a new product. And I have seen many products in my 21+ year career.

No

It was very easy and we were up and running the product the same day.

Purchased and implemented directly through Sauce Labs.

High but I cannot disclose value.

Very low but cannot disclose amount.

No

No

There are a few features that makes this service a top-tier solution. First there is the automatic video recording of the test runs that records the actions taken. For any debugging that you have to do this makes this service invaluable. Often times I would look at the recording first before I started debugging the test locally since I would likely find the issue there faster than starting up my own debugging session. 

Second best feature is the use of real mobile devices as an option for some of the test runs. There is no substitute for running tests on real devices. After setting up and maintaining a local testing grid of 9 mobile devices I can assure you using a service that does it for you is so much better. There were some weeks that were spent on just fixing issues when using my own devices.

The best feature though is the fact that they use the WebDriver protocol for executing actions on their service. A lot of companies just used their own variations on the WebDriver. This then meant that you had to write another set of wrapper functions just to make the current framework work with whatever vendor you were using. Sauce Labs just used the standard remote WebDriver. Which meant that all you needed to change was the hub url to point to their hub and you were done. If you wanted to there is a few lines of code that let you mark the test runs as successful or failed from your side instead of their generic completed message. All told that is 5 minutes of work and it would have better integration with whatever your process is.

The ability to share the tests that failed with the developers improved the overall efficiency of the team since there was no ambiguity on why a test failed. In addition we used some of the recorded test runs with the business to clarify the functionality of some of the more complicated features.

My company wanted test coverage for some devices that were not available on Sauce Labs so I still had to manage a small "test lab" with those devices. Some of the devices were Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry 7 and 10. On our site the only reported instances of those devices accessing our site was the test devices after 6 months so I am still unsure why we wanted to support those.

Actually since their service was so stable it helped identify some flaky tests. Before those tests were executed on bad machines so if they failed they would be executed again and then it would pass. But by running the tests on Sauce helped identified that the test itself was flaky so the tests were refactored into stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability. I personally wished that we had a budget to get more parallel executions but the cost was not justifiable.

Their customer service reps are fantastic! They have heard of all of the typical issues that can occur in business and offer solutions to it such as using one of the professional tiers to make sure that their service integrates into the workflow before going to the full blown enterprise plans.

We had used Perfecto Mobile but was unhappy since it was not easy to integrate with our existing framework. Business wanted the devices to be real devices everywhere in the world so went ahead and purchased Perfecto Mobile without trying the service.

The initial setup was so easy that I thought I must be missing something. Since their service provides so many features I was certain that there must be some other options that I have to declare in the code to get those features, but no it was really that straight forward. 

I implemented it in-house since I was tired of managing 25 virtual machines and 12 mobile devices and 5 physical machines on a seemingly daily basis.

Truly agile companies that are constantly testing should get the enterprise solution that they have with dedicated machines. For more ad hoc testing or just testing before the release the pricing on their site would be the best.

I evaluated Perfecto Mobile and BrowserStack before testing out Sauce Labs and they did not compete well enough with Sauce Labs. Perfecto did have more devices available around the world than Sauce Labs but the connections were slow.

The Primary use caes would be the following :

• Using the device farm and also using the ability to use the virtual and real devices for the purposes of software Quality Analysis testing.
• There are projects that sometimes require a variety of devices to perform software testing on and having the repository of devices to choose from that my company might not have greatly assisted with this use.
• Especially in handling massive loads of users. Since there is virtual emulation as well as device farms with actual devices this allows a great number of devices for a team to test with.

Sauce Labs has been a saving grace for our company. More so in recent years if I'm going by my own personal experience.

When you consider the positive plus points relative to having multiple devices, especially with the recent pandemic being under lockdown as well as just a general work from home situation before. Having Sauce Labs farm has been greatly beneficial to many people within the organization and has helped keep the project turn around time on track.

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 as I mentioned would be the benefit of having mobile devices on hand even if it's virtually so in abundance for our testers In my company. 

Another positive is having an up to date device farm and virtual emulation of devices. The time it takes to allocate and purchase devices on the scale it would normally need is completely deducted from the issues we would have to face from a day perspective or even project-wise. On top of that, having to maintain these devices would be another undertaking and require resources that we as a company do not have to concern ourselves with anymore.

If I had to speak of an area that could be improved it would probably have to be the speed of interaction with the devices. There is at times a considerable amount of lag while using some of the virtual and at times even physical device farms. While this is absolutely better than not having it situation Sauce Labs certainly would benefit as well as we the user would certainly benefit from gaining a software interaction speed boost. Having it more consistent would be greatly appreciated if the long run. This is the only thing affecting the testing time at the moment and can even be seen as a disadvantage in comparison to having an actual physical device in hand.

i have been using saucelabs for about 6 years or so within the company I work for

Stability-wise it's just okay. The speed of this software needs to improve a lot of possible.

Very good as it has the ability to appeal to a lot of users despite some lagful moments.

Customer service is good. I have personally not had an issue myself but from those that have it has never been anything but positive .

I have not personally used another solution prior to Sauce Labs.

Pretty straightforward for the most part.

We deployed with an in-house team.

In terms of projects, it's per-project basis. So it varies but it certainly has saved time.

I'm unaware if my company has done so but I imagine they did and still chose Sauce Labs as the best option.

It's certainly worth a try if anything . I can confirm it has definitely been a help to myself and the company I work for and it probably will do the same for others.