Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Appium vs Sauce Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (7th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Sauce Labs
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (13th), Test Automation Tools (19th)
 

Featured Reviews

Luis Gerardo Meneses Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for direct interaction with an application's DOM but complex configuration
What I like about Appium right now is that it's like Cypress in the sense that I can get to the new DOM of the application and select the components and create the functions to test the components in the way I want them to be tested. That's why I like it right now.
AnupKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good stability and robust but lacks generative AI capabilities
Technical support is equally very important. If you talk about anything deployed to production, and the project is live, customers are using that, and they might face some issues, some functional issues. That's when support people play a role in identifying the fix or the incident. Based on that, we create an incident based on the customer defect or whatever. Once the incident gets raised, the support will play a role in working on that particular incident. If it's a code-based incident, administration, or integration issue, support people play a big role in resolving those issues before reaching the exact developers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has great documentation and excellent community support."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"We develop apps using the React Native framework, and Appium integrates well for testing those apps. The Appium automation framework also has good integration with GitHub Actions and plenty of other tools and frameworks, including BrowserStack."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"The solution helps with test automation. We focus mostly on Java."
"The solution is stable."
"It offers the single best solution for integrating deep automated browser testing in a CI/CD pipeline."
"Sauce Connect gave us ability to test an application that was hosted locally."
"The Failure Analysis feature is really important for us, one of the most important aspects. What is the root cause? Is it because we have a defect or is it that we have a test case that we need to fix or modify? The Failure Analysis is one of the main functionalities that I am exploring all the time in Sauce Labs... The Failure Analysis helps us to discover which test cases we need to work on."
"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 find that the multitude of browser and OS versions are very helpful for broadening testing scope."
"Maintaining many environments for test is a bear. These guys make it so easy with their CI integration that you can have tests going in after a few hours."
"The solution they provide is very robust. We can quickly connect to their environment with the hub URL. They have a URL that has the entire grid of desktops, web browsers, and mobile devices. They also provide real devices, so you just provide the URL and test your application."
"Sauce Labs helps us identify the root causes of bugs. The solution offers a lot of flexibility by providing the latest iOS and Android emulator versions, and even the Appium updates when it comes out in the market."
 

Cons

"What needs improvement in Appium is its documentation. It needs to give more context on the libraries that Appium is using under the hood. For example, my team is using Appium for Android automation, and a lot of times, I feel that there's functionality that's available through the Appium interface, that exists within the UIAutomator, but there aren't a lot of useful or helpful resources on the internet to find that information, so it would be good to have some linkage with the underlying platform itself. Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes. For example, at times, there's a bug in the inspector application that doesn't allow me to save my desired capability set, so it would be nice to get that bug fixed, but overall, Appium is a good tool. The Touch Actions functionality in Appium also needs improvement. For example, if I want to initiate a scroll on the device that I'm running Appium on, sometimes Swipe works, but in other situations, I have to explicitly use action chains, so I'm not too sure what's the better approach. What I'd like to see in the next version of Appium is a more intelligent and more intuitive AppiumLibrary, in terms of identifying menus and scroll bars, etc., because right now, I'm unsure if I have to do a lot of export reversals to get to the elements I'm looking for. It would be nice to have some functionality built in, which would allow me to easily get those exports."
"One area where I think Appium could improve is in addressing security concerns for our data. Currently, we're unable to use cloud solutions like CloudForm due to security restrictions on our servers. We also face challenges in updating packages for the same reason. It would be beneficial if the solution could provide better support for auto-reporting and easier connections to mobile device farms."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"Stability is an area that needs some improvement."
"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"They should add an in-built framework."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement."
"We have faced challenges with the availability of mobile devices. There was once or twice where there were no mobile devices available."
"When we were in development, it was a bit of a pain because we have onshore and offshore development. One of our development shops is in India, and we were running tests over there. When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn't have enough licenses. That was during the core development before we even launched."
"Sauce Labs' dashboard could be improved by adding more filters and allowing more customization options. There was one instance where the dashboard on the Sauce Labs UI didn't meet our requirements, so we had to use the Sauce Labs API to create some apps and dashboards on our own. The API endpoints could be a little more robust and customizable."
"One of the challenging areas for us is the reporting and the matrix. It should be based on roles, but right now it is only available for the admin role. The admin role can really do a lot of stuff, but our infrastructure team, which holds the admin role, is not ready to hand it over to us on the testing team. If Sauce Labs had permissions associated with roles, where this role could do this activity and that role could do that activity, it would be easier for us."
"I may not know what should be improved on the platform, but I think it could offer a greater variety of testing solutions. I know there might be competing solutions that cover more things I'm unaware of, and it could expand a bit more. We've done a lot of automated testing scenarios, and that's all the rage these days, so I think Sauce Labs could look at potential ways to improve and cover other scenarios."
"Integration with Github, as well as several other similar tools, could be improved."
"Better and programmatic controls on request/response recordings and sharing with developers."
"The pricing model of Sauce Labs could be more flexible. Sauce Labs has just one price for the type of solution and a set number of devices. Other solutions have a fee for the base solution and an additional cost per device. If you're a smaller organization, you have to consider your needs. Some smaller companies still need to test various devices, so my advice is to start small and scale up as needed. We had initially planned to start big, but that would have been a big waste."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Appium is free and open-source."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"The solution is open source."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"The pricing is definitely on the higher end, and there are other options that are more cost-effective."
"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."
"We pay for a specific number of VMs."
"They could improve on the pricing because it seems pretty expensive. I'm sure it's justified, but it's expensive."
"When you reach the Enterprise licensing tier, base level being with 10 concurrent test sessions, pricing is essentially per-unit-of-concurrency thereafter with a relatively linear increase and not much benefit for "bulk"."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"It could be less like pay-per-use with a lower rate."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Regression Testing Tools solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend Appium?
I do recommend Appium. It is an open-source solution and completely free of charge. We use Appium and Appium Studio as our base for any type of mobile automation for testing. It has a great interfa...
What do you like most about Appium?
Appium helps me to do as much as much as I want to.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appium?
My experience with Appium from a pricing perspective is favorable due to it being open source, making it a cost-effective option.
What do you like most about Sauce Labs?
It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.
What needs improvement with Sauce Labs?
Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI, which can reduce the human effort in writing test cases. For example, in my current project, we reduced the time it took to complete user...
What is your primary use case for Sauce Labs?
I work as an automation engineer using Selenium WebDriver with Java, and API automation using Rest Assured with Java. I have also worked with Docker integration on AWS. Additionally, I have experie...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. Sauce Labs and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.