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Appium vs CrossBrowserTesting 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 (12th), Regression Testing Tools (7th)
CrossBrowserTesting
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (28th)
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Independent consultant, at OpenText
Efficient mobile testing with intuitive emulation capabilities and a user-friendly interface
Initial setup for Appium (especially for iOS) is not beginner-friendly.Consumes too much of your host machine's resources, potentially slowing down the machine.Appium Inspector often lacks deep insight or crashes with certain app builds. Improve test flakiness by intelligently selecting robust self-healing locators,simplified installers, better documentation, GUI-based config management,smart wait mechanisms and better failure logs.
CN
Senior DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Knowledgeable support, scalable, and stable
We use CrossBrowserTesting for testing our web-based applications We had some issues with the onboarding process and the cloud conductivity could improve. I have used CrossBrowserTesting within the past 12 months. CrossBrowserTesting is stable. I have found CrossBrowserTesting to be scalable.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is an indispensable tool for mobile automation helps much in converting manual test cases to automated scripts."
"It can be used with different programming languages."
"The way Appium server interacts with mobile apps is fantastic. It provides all the information about the elements inside the app, Android as well as iOS. I can interact with the element quickly, just type some text or get some text values from the element - whether it's a drop-down, or web text, or a native element."
"When it comes to mobile automation, I recommend this solution because of its performance, and scalability over the competition."
"I like that Appium is an opensource tool, I also like its cross-platform flexibility, and Appium provides a record-and-play option with commands that 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 library is extensive so the driver interacts with most functions or actions on mobile devices."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"It has great documentation and excellent community support."
"Each new session started with the live testing feature allows for a cleared browser and new experience to be able to not only see these attributes on the page clearly but also pass clean data."
"The ability to choose from many devices is the best feature."
"The ability to replay sessions is valuable for tracking down issues."
"The screen shot portal is essential for an easy way to run tests across hundreds of browsers and retrieve screenshots which then indicate success or failure."
"It helps to speed up the process to test the product in different devices and browsers, making it easy to troubleshoot some issues."
"I have found CrossBrowserTesting to be scalable."
"Aside from speeding up our processes, it also allowed us to tie in our automated test scenarios and integrate our reporting tools to make the entire process efficient and hassle free."
"I can run a page through the screenshot tool, then send a URL with the results to my team."
 

Cons

"The setup and installation were a problem for us at first."
"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."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually. Its execution speed is also very slow."
"Support-wise, it could be better. Whenever we get some issues, it may take some time."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"I'm facing a lot of issues with my new juniors when they set up Appium for iOS."
"The speed to connect to mobile devices needs improvement, and sometimes the connection fails."
"The "Getting Started" documentation for Selenium testing could be improved."
"Sometimes the testing is slow."
"A wider range of physical devices with more browser versions in the Selenium Grid would be great to insure users with out-of-date devices are able to interact with our sites."
"We had some issues with the onboarding process and the cloud conductivity could improve."
"A problem that we are facing quite often is related to the network connection. Tests can fail if the remote CrossBrowserTesting's VM has connection problems. This happens mostly with browsers of Internet Explorer family which work on Windows OS."
"The five minute timeouts can cause irritation if you have just popped away to consult some supporting documentation."
"I had some problems with the local connection, but there is someone that can help us always on customer support chat."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"The solution is free."
"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."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"CrossBrowserTesting offered the best value for its price."
"It is worth the pricing as the product is supported on multiple platforms and browsers."
"A few intermediary pricing options for small QA teams would be nice, e.g., unlimited screenshots, "as you need it" parallel tests, etc."
"SmartBear offers bundles of products that work together."
"The lowest price point is very reasonable. It is also useful if only one person in the company needs to check on the browser display."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
 

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 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 needs improvement with Appium?
The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement. Additionally, the wait time functionality could be enhanced as I experienced failures with longer wait times.
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Accenture, Sony, Los Angeles Times, ADP, Verizon, T-Mobile, Wistia
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. CrossBrowserTesting and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.