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Appium vs OpenText Silk Test comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
Ranking in Regression Testing Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (12th)
OpenText Silk Test
Ranking in Regression Testing Tools
9th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (19th), Test Automation Tools (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Regression Testing Tools category, the mindshare of Appium is 2.0%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Silk Test is 2.9%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Regression Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Appium2.0%
OpenText Silk Test2.9%
Other95.1%
Regression Testing Tools
 

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.
JG
Manager of Central Excellence at Alpura
Easy to set up with good documentation and easy management of testing cycles
The solution allows for a complete test cycle. The management of testing cycles are easy. We have good control over test cases. We can capture functional testing very easily. We're actually able to accelerate testing now and have end-to-end cycles for testing. We didn't used to have these capabilities. It's easy to automate and accelerate testing. The product offers very good cross-browser testing capabilities. We can do continuous testing and regression testing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"What I like about Appium right now is that it's like Cypress in the sense that............. to test the components in the way I want them to be tested."
"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."
"We chose Appium for the scalability and the ease of automation for both Android and iOS."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Appium are the in-built functionality, which we can use in our code. For example, move back, move front, navigate one page before, and navigate one page ahead. You can do this by using the in-built functions from Appium."
"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."
"This is the best test automation tool for any mobile test automation engineer."
"The feature I like most is the ease of reporting, as you get a single frame of reporting across all the various tests and the program is very user-friendly."
"It drastically reduced our manual regression efforts that is difficult to achieve in Agile model."
"The statistics that are available are very good, the solution offers very good detailed reports, and it's excellent for testing an application's performance levels."
"The ability to develop scripts in Visual Studio, Visual Studio integration, is the most valuable feature."
"It's easy to automate and accelerate testing."
"The statistics that are available are very good."
"The feature I like most is the ease of reporting."
"A good automation tool that supports SAP functional testing."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to add a dependency manager."
"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."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"They can improve test reporting, and more importantly on test scripts, by providing less constructs to automate more complex testing scenarios."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Support-wise, it could be better. Whenever we get some issues, it may take some time."
"At the moment, when we are trying to use this tool, we are finding quite a few compatibility issues between the tool and the applications on the test. We wouldn't consider it perfectly stable for that reason."
"Everything is very manual. It's up to us to find out exactly what the issues are."
"I've seen a lot of potential users upset with the SilkTest due to broken installation."
"GUI interface could be simpler for non-developers."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex if you're deploying on-prem."
"At that time, we never had good technical support in Bangalore."
"The solution has a lack of compatibility with newer technologies."
"Implementing a better integration with Git. It was extremely painful to implement the link from Silk Central to Git."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"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."
"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."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"The solution is free."
"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"We paid annually. There is a purchase cost, and then there is an ongoing maintenance fee."
"Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis, and while I think that the price is quite reasonable I am not allowed to share those details."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Silk Test?
The pricing depends on the license used. The pricing is similar to others in the market.
What is your primary use case for Silk Test?
The product is used for manual, functional, and performance testing. I'm using the tool for loading data into ERP systems.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Segue, SilkTest, Micro Focus Silk Test
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Krung Thai Computer Services, Quality Kiosk, Mªller, AVG Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. OpenText Silk Test and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.