What is our primary use case?
There are two main use cases of Tosca. It is typically used for test automation, which is its main use case. Another use case is the test case design, which is around modeling an application from a business perspective.
What is most valuable?
The automation engine is very strong, and it is very competitive in the market in terms of features. They develop a lot of features.
What needs improvement?
It is very expensive as compared to other tools that we have in the market. Its price is the main challenge because of which it is sometimes hard to sell Tosca because customers don't have that kind of budget.
Their license management should be improved. One of our customers is a global customer. They want to use one licensed server and then split the licenses based on the different users of the different business units, but currently, there is only one license server that everybody can access. There is no control, and that's why sometimes congestion can happen. It is good for Tosca because they can say, "Hey, your license count is overrun. So, you get more licenses or buy more licenses," but from a customer's point of view, this is really bad because they don't know exactly what usage is happening against each business unit because they can't group them. That's a big problem. So, for each group, they have to clear different license servers in different VMs. That's definitely a key area of improvement and a major challenge I have faced. They could also provide short-term licenses, such as three-month or four-month consumption licenses.
In terms of the overall architecture, we need to have something light weighted rather than so heavy. If we have something light-weighted, it would definitely be easily adaptable for any customer. In terms of containerization, it is very hard to properly containerize Tosca. They can think around the architecture and simplify things, but to be fair to them, the product has grown organically, and it has always grown based on feature requests. Everybody has jumped in and provided feedback to them to develop new features every now and then. They always have had a busy pipeline, which I understand, but it has been a long need from a customer point of view to have a simplified architecture. They need to simplify their architecture, which they seem to be doing.
Reporting has been the biggest challenge for a long time. There are quite a lot of third-party products, but there is no proper integration. Based on what I remember when I last spoke to them, they are working on a cloud platform, and they want to re-platform everything. I'm guessing they are addressing these issues in that platform.
I've tried Vision AI that they have created, but it isn't there yet. They have oversold it. It looks promising, and in the next few years, hopefully, it will become very good.
Their support can also be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for almost eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It seems stable. It has improved over the years. I've worked with it from version 9.1 to version 15. Based on what I've seen in the past, its performance is much better now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable because there is no coding, but from an architecture and infrastructure perspective, it is very hard. So, scalability is a problem because the architecture is heavy.
How are customer service and support?
Their support is okay. If you get the right people, then it is awesome because they will jump into a call and show you what needs to be done. They will help you, but getting that right person is a big challenge.
When you log a ticket, you get a response, which is a very standard response, and they don't follow up with you. If someone is not following up, that ticket stays there for long. So, the problem is around the management of the people there. I have seen support from other companies as well, and Tricentis can improve from the support perspective.
How was the initial setup?
It is simple. The only challenge is the high infrastructure cost associated with it. Sometimes people underestimate it. It's not a true SaaS solution. Based on the discussions I had, they were moving towards SaaS, and that's the future, but at this point, it's a very heavy solution that is dependent on the on-premise infrastructure, but the installation is easy. You can do it via GUI and you can do it unattended through the command line. So, installation-wise, I haven't faced many issues. They are more around the configurations and the actual infrastructure.
What about the implementation team?
We are one of the top partners of Tricentis, and we do the implementation.
In terms of maintenance, Tosca is easier to maintain than other solutions such as Selenium and any open-source tool. The only challenge is the infrastructure cost. You have to have that infrastructure always up and running. If you are setting up this infrastructure on the cloud, utilization becomes a big challenge, specifically when you want to run multiple test cases on multiple machines. You have to set up all these agent machines, which is also a problem with UiPath. These are good tools, but they are not good in terms of future infrastructure cloud readiness. If I want to install things, there should be flexibility for ramping down and up based on the demand. This is something that none of these tools have at this point. Selenium probably has this because it is open-source, and you can create your own framework on top of it to add those features, but with Tosca and UiPath, because these technologies and features are controlled by the company, you can't add those features, and if you don't have those features, it becomes a big dependency and a problem.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Tosca is expensive. I don't see small and medium customers going for it. It's always large enterprises that have a big pocket. It is very expensive as compared to the other tools that we have in the market. They should reduce the price by half, and if they do that, they would do better business. From the competition perspective, other solutions are at a pretty similar level. UiPath is also very expensive.
One thing that I always wanted was a short-term consumption license. With Tricentis, the biggest challenge is that you have to go for a minimum of one year license, and they also try to sell you a three-year license. It would be good if people can get a three-month or four-month consumption license. It should be on a monthly basis versus on a yearly basis. In today's world, the DevOps teams are decentralized, and the budget is decentralized. A project manager doesn't have a budget for the entire enterprise. He only has the budget for his project or for two or three testers. They need to deliver certain features with two or three testers. If they have to use Tricentis Tosca, it is very hard because Tricentis will force you to get a one-year license because, for them, recurring revenue is important. Even though they claim to be a continuous testing leader, in the real DevOps world, they have struggled to sell because of this factor. When the teams are small, they need flexibility, and if you don't give flexibility around license, it is very hard.
In terms of licensing, typically, we have concurrent users. You buy the license, and that license can be installed on a server and anybody can use it. If you use it, that license gets checked out by your name, and nobody else would be able to use it. It is based on concurrent users, rather than named users, which is good.
What other advice do I have?
Nowadays, everybody is trying to copy Tricentis Tosca because it is a leader in this space. It is the leader as per Gartner, Forrester, and PeerSpot. Every tool has its pros and cons. One particular product that I liked was Provar, which is specifically for Salesforce. They really went into the code to track any changes. Apart from that, open-source solutions are its biggest competitors. I've seen a lot of open-source frameworks that are better than Tosca and have the flexibility on the containerization side and the reporting side, but from the commercial tool perspective, Tosca is a leader in every aspect. I haven't seen any other tool that has a better capability than Tosca. The automation engine is pretty strong in Tosca.
If you have a manual testing background, it is much easier to adapt to Tosca, but if you're coming from a coding background, you will have to unlearn and think from a manual tester's perspective and work with Tosca. There is a learning curve. So, you need to go through that learning curve, and you should be ready for that. It isn't very complicated, but you definitely need to spend some time. You would need at least two to three months. Their training is not that great. It gives you a basic idea, but it doesn't give you project-related ideas. You really need to work on real-time projects to actually understand the value of the tool.
I would rate it an eight out of 10. There are certain things that they can improve. Apart from those, it is pretty good.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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