Sauce Labs Reviews

• Parallel run
• Real device testing

Fast automation.

Playback needs improvement.

For two years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Their customer service is excellent.

Their technical support is excellent.

No.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation was done in-house.

It is good.

No.

Automated mobile testing dashboard.

We can now run daily and on demand automated tests.

Sometimes the tests can pass or fail inconsistently. The tunnels and jobs timeout before the app loads, or it has to try 3 or 4 times to get a good connection.

4 months.

No.

No.

Not yet :)

I have not used it.

I have not used it.

No, I haven't.

Initial setup was easy. Our company already had the account open, but I simply added the sauce configurations to my test configuration file and ran the test.

Cross browser/OS testing and mobile testing.

We work on a complex SaaS web application which has lot of regression testing. If we were to run all our tests on different browsers/different OS combinations, we would need lot of new infrastructure and VM's. But with Sauce labs, we were able to use Remote WebDriver and connect to their VM's which have all the combinations we are looking for.

We still see simulators for a few mobiles in their VM's, we want to test on real devices. 

With only a few months of service under our teams belt, it has been nothing but excellent. We joined during the web interface transition and it is a more enjoyable experience. Once tapped into their API, our testing suites contain reliable information we can validate across the platform, switching between Sauce results and our own. This obviously makes troubleshooting much less daunting. Their documentation system is much improved. We rely on their services for mobile iOS and web testing across several projects.

With the rebranding and a focus on providing physical device testing. Sauce seems capable of being a top service provider now and into the future.

We run eight virtual iOS simulators with our suite of over 280 feature tests. Parallel runs reduce our total execution runtime to a little over 2 hours. By adding some clever logic into our driver class for Sauce, we can send tests to random device configurations to achieve greater coverage without running the entire suite against every device. Interacting with the API makes this easily possible. We don't need to use Sauce Connect and perform each session configuration within our driver class.

The only caveat to mention, is the availability of the next release of iOS on their systems. Their adoption seems a bit slow. I understand Sauce is making an effort to enhance their current infrastructure to make updating to the latest iOS release easier in the future.

The ability to run on multiple browsers, simulators, and emulators and the ability to proxy to other locations. Also, it runs on the cloud, so you don't have physical setups to run all of this.

Currently, it's being used to run tests after deployment of some of our services so we know the status of the services. We also use it to run tests on a schedule so we can check the status of the services (if it's passing/failing). Because we can start up more than one VM through it, we can also run the tests in parallel, meaning tests can be completed faster than running it locally on one machine.

Start execution time as each time a set of tests start, it will launch a new VM so it takes a bit of time.

A couple of months.

Just some of the slowness, we are still investigating if this can be improved on our end and if it's network related.

Some browsers doesn't support video playback which we use for some of our tests.

If too many tests are run in parallel using Sauce Connect, sometimes the tests time out. So we had to limit the number of parallel executions.

Pretty good. The customer service guys are responsive, and will respond with a reply in less than a day.

It is also quite good. Some good suggestions are given when questions are asked.

Previously, we were only running it locally.

Pretty straightforward as the documentation is quite extensive.

In-house.

I would say quite high.

Trial the product and see if it suits your needs.

Nope.

I would definitely recommend - the community and customer service are good. The improvements are continuous with regular updates.

The most valuable feature would have to be the cross-browser testing functionality. Our product specifications say that we support the Big Four browsers – Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari – latest versions and up to two versions back. When including mobile, that’s 10 different browsers (and browser drivers) to maintain. This would be a near impossible task for our small testing team.

It also gives us the ability to replay our tests back in video form. This makes attempting to debug failed tests not a breeze, but easier. It also helps convincing (stubborn) developers that there is a problem.

We have been able to successfully integrate Sauce Labs into our automated test environment. From that we are able to run our test suite across multiple browsers overnight. This gives us a level of confidence that we previously didn’t have.

The other huge benefit we get from this product is the manual testing powers. When a client tells us that they’re having issues on a particular browser. We’re able to fire up that exact version and reproduce the problem ourselves.

Speed is the key. We’re a business in Australia, so any tests that we perform are having to travel to America and back. This is time that we have to wait on for us to get responses back. In an active business every second counts.

We've been using it for about 12 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with instability.

We haven’t had any problems that we couldn’t work around, or there wasn’t any documentation on. The only problem is that hit that point where it’s unfeasible to expand our UI testing framework as the cost to run a shed load of tests is too much for our business.

This has been an area of focus from Sauce Labs. Their customer service is unmatched, and their help documents have all been recently updated.

We have used a local Selenium grid, and still do to write our tests. However, we valued the cross-browser accessibility over speed for our nightly automated test suite.

Initial setup was somewhat difficult originally. That was due to multiple reasons, namely lack of actual programming experience on our behalf, and the documentation at the time was a mountain to climb. Sauce Labs has since updated this documentation, and we have since gained experience.

Our in-house team performed the implementation. For advice, it’s a lot like setting up Selenium Grid. One thing we did was have an Environmental Variable “ISTESTLOCAL”, we use this as a gate to whether or not our tests should run on Sauce Labs or not. This is very helpful in increasing the speed which we can write and debug our own tests.

Also, if using the Bamboo plugin, make sure to check the settings page as there is a list of already in use environmental variables set when Sauce Labs runs.

The biggest things you have to consider is how much testing you’re planning on doing, who is your client base, and what browsers they’re using, and what can’t be tested using API testing.

If you have any issues with the product just shoot the support team an email. They always get back to me promptly with the best solution they have available. Also, spend the time to read the documentation.

If your company is security conscious, as it should be, look into Sauce Connect which creates a secure tunnel between Sauce Labs and yourself.

To being with, I had to find a way to communicate between a MAC and Windows machine in order to run tests specific to IE. Tons of stack overflows and, finally, I found Sauce Labs. Simple + straight forward + easy to use + pre loaded + runs PERFECTLY + great dashboard. 

So in short it was fun first time experience, and having 14 days trial really allowed me see the full stretch of how the SL environments are.

PROS: All that I mentioned above + the super awesome tech support guys, who are really technical when it comes to SL's product.

CONS: None so far in my first 8 days of usage. Probably an additional 15 days of trial [just kidding], I will ping/communicate/ if I stumble across a problem for sure.

The combination of OS platforms, platform versions, browsers and browser versions support on VMs.

Cross browser and cross platform testing on our test case scenarios.

A little clarity on documentation when integrating with third party APIs will help the users. Take for example, when a high-level language like Gherkin comes into the picture- how should users handle it?

I've used it for four months.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

Yes, the parallelization is not possible now when cucumber and junit are used together.

Haven't had the need to interact with them.

Haven't had the need to call them.

We weren't previously using a different solution.

Straightforward since the cloud based examples were clear.

Implemented in-house.

Working on open sourcing an API based on Sauce Labs support that can benefit both the parties and the community in general.

Our monthly cost as of now is $149/month for a small team.

No, we used local machines by installing different versions of browsers and platforms. I am now trying to promote this idea of using Sauce Lab across my company moving forward.