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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

"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to launch applications. Appium has everything that Selenium has. So many good tools support Appium. We can take some Excel sheets and use them to fill out the text box that's in there. We can also take screenshots of failures."
"When it comes to mobile automation, I recommend this solution because of its performance, and scalability over the competition."
"Appium is a great tool, and I recommend it."
"This solution has improved our organization in terms of efficiency."
"It has flaws, but is still much better than any other cross-platform mobile automation tool."
"For the particular use case we used Appium for, we felt that it served our purpose completely, and we haven't had any issues with the Python Client for Appium."
"This is the best test automation tool for any mobile test automation engineer."
"I haven't explored other solutions in this particular area, but what I like best about Appium is the fact that it shares functions with Selenium. The extension of Selenium functions allows me to use all of the methods that exist in that domain, and it just makes it simpler for me. I've been using Selenium for some time as well, so using Appium just seems like a natural fit for me."
"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."
"CBT has made it easier to troubleshoot issues across devices when we do not have actual access to those specific devices. I even opt for CBT sometimes when we do have access to the device just because it is easier."
"SmartBear has excellent, informative webinars, so keep an eye out for those."
"Selenium Grid allows testing multiple platforms to insure functionality for most users."
"The CrossBrowserTesting Selenium API and live test features have greatly improved our team's ability to quickly and effectively perform QA."
"It helps to speed up the process to test the product in different devices and browsers, making it easy to troubleshoot some issues."
"CrossBrowserTesting helps a lot with the responsive testing in different mobiles and browsers and has good tools for our testing like taking videos and screenshots."
"CrossBrowserTesting allows us to test our site with real-world devices in real-world scenarios and find what we're missing."
 

Cons

"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"The user interface needs improvement because there are issues when setting up environment variables."
"The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments."
"Configuration-wise, there is a lot of room for improvement."
"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."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually. Its execution speed is also very slow."
"The product was a bit difficult to install. It wasn’t easy. We had issues."
"Sometimes, the Appium server won't connect with the mobile application because of some socket issues, so network connectivity between applications and the Appium server could be improved."
"This solution would benefit from faster testing and support for more devices."
"The speed connection in mobile devices could be improved, because sometimes the load time is uncertain."
"It would be useful if we can run the live-testing test cases on multiple platforms at the same time, instead of waiting for one session to finish."
"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."
"The "Getting Started" documentation for Selenium testing could be improved."
"The screenshot tool defaults to a screen layout instead of a full page test. I find it a bit cumbersome that I can't have it run a full screenshot as my default."
"I had some problems with the local connection, but there is someone that can help us always on customer support chat."
"I have had quite a few issues trying to use a virtual machine to test our application on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"The solution is open source."
"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"The solution is free."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"SmartBear offers bundles of products that work together."
"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."
"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.