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Appium vs Automation Anywhere 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)
Automation Anywhere
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
585
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (2nd), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (3rd), Agentic Automation (1st)
 

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.
Vatsal Mehta - PeerSpot reviewer
Accommodates diverse use cases and effectively meets customer requirements
AI agents need further improvements. AI agent technology in agentic process automation is still evolving. We have only scratched the surface, and there are many potential use cases yet to be explored. As technology advances, I believe it will enable us to implement more comprehensive automation solutions. Document Automation has issues related to speed. When I compare Document Automation with IQ Bot, IQ Bot is faster than Document Automation. My understanding is that they are still evolving Document Automation, and this issue of slowness will be resolved in the upcoming .35 version, so we are good with that. They are working on signature identification and validations for handwritten documents. Currently, we are able to extract data out of scanned but digital images, but there is still scope for improvement for handwritten documents.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Appium's wide support of programming languages is valuable."
"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."
"The best feature of Appium is that it allows you to inspect the element. With the Appium Inspector, you don't have to install another application to do the inspection. I also like that Appium has Android device connectivity. Currently, most people use Appium as automation software, and I haven't found any other tool that's more powerful than Appium."
"Appium provides a record-and-play option, and the commands are the same as those that Selenium uses. So a person who has some exposure to Selenium will be able to write a piece of code in Appium."
"The solution is easy to use."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The automation part is extremely helpful in streamlining our processes."
"Within less time than it used to take, we can automate a complete Apex task."
"A has a bouquet of features that can be used in our projects. We have utilized all the features in our existing projects. It may be task bots, meta bots, or IQ bots. The features in the AA bots may be object cloning or security features where the bots can be triggered only from the control room and will help clients to maintain their security concerns."
"For the beginners, it is an easy tool compared to other tools in market. Users can understand the line by line code and code it easily. There is no syntax or anything else. They can easily drag and drop, executing the bot directly."
"The scalability of Automation Anywhere, the framework, and user interface are particularly impressive."
"The features I most appreciate are the built-in version control system, historical log, audit trail features, and the breadth of RPA action commands included out of the box."
"With our conversion from v11 to A360, there has been better ease of development of components within the control room for our development teams."
"It extracts what the IQ Bot does, converting it and ensuring the entire process right from the input to the output and is fully automated. It is digitizing a particular process, which is really great."
"Automation Anywhere improved our organization since it saved us a lot monetary value."
 

Cons

"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."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"An application developed on the Unity platform, such as a gaming application, objects are moving in that case. Interacting with those elements is still lacking in Appium. Appium doesn't have the internal library to play with the Unity platform. That is a huge lack right now."
"Appium can improve when the case fails, there should be a feature where you can generate the report from Appium. Once you're on a test case, automatically the screenshot should be captured which would avoid manual intervention. These features would be beneficial to migrate to Appium."
"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."
"Appium could improve by enabling record and run techniques similar to what they have in other licensing tools, such as Micro Focus. We have to all write the code, and then we can proceed."
"There is always a concern about the amount of code that is required to enhance the automation process. The idea of having less code or no code is what we would like to see in future updates."
"The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement."
"20 percent of the bots need to supervised because sometimes errors occur during the run. Most of the errors that I have encountered have been because the object cloning did not capture the buttons properly."
"Citrix is only in the development stage. Automation Anywhere could put some time into improving this more."
"More and more innovation is going on, and they'll have to keep adding features to keep up with the market. They have generative AI on their platform, but that's a new part. They are working on it. It's not 100 percent foolproof, but eventually it will get better. They need to work on their AI capabilities."
"Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it?"
"We need a better way of getting upgrades or defect fixes. It is creating problems for us, as we have to go for a completely new version. Maintaining and managing existing bots, then coming up with new ones takes a lot of time. We would rather have a batch fix than an installation to an installation."
"In the next release, once the bot is triggered, the system should always recognize the active state and not prompt the user to log in again before the bot finishes all of its tasks."
"The version that we are using has been difficult for us to code. As changes are very frequent, we have to make sure the code can be updated automatically so we don't have to make a change every time a user makes a change. Then, the user doesn't have to update us and we don't have to push a change to production. We have found a workaround with the help of the Automation Anywhere support people for this."
"Their OCR is a bit expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"I'm unsure if there's any cost associated with Appium. I got the free package which includes the server GUI application and the inspector application, and it was free to download, and that's all I need to get my work done. I'm not aware of any additional costs associated with the tool."
"We found out that we could explore features of the solution for 30 days trial. We can switch to a permanent license later if we want."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"The solution is open-source."
"The solution is open source."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"We have reduced our headcount, approximately 200 to 300 employees, by eliminating manual, repetitive work. It provides profit to the business."
"It's an ideal pricing model to customize the components based on everyone's needs."
"Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent."
"We would like to use Citrix going forward. We use Bot Runners to scale up, and it gets to be expensive. Using Citrix, it can mitigate costs."
"They're very flexible around pricing and licensing."
"Its usage is expensive for us because my user base is mostly in Manila and KL. The unit cost of labor is cheaper there than in the U.S. or Australia, which puts a bit more stress on how to get a positive ROI while continuing to use it."
"It is not cheap, but we are able to get an ROI."
"Its cost is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

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.
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is very good in certain situations but lacks in others. For me, it's more the team tha...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applications that AA has limitations for, such as the Oracle. For web-based applicatio...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. Automation Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.