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Appium vs SmartBear TestComplete 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)
SmartBear TestComplete
Ranking in Regression Testing Tools
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (8th), Test Automation Tools (6th)
 

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 SmartBear TestComplete is 9.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Regression Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SmartBear TestComplete9.2%
Appium2.0%
Other88.8%
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.
Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Test Lead at Emerson
Used for integration automation, user-based automation, and web automation
The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts. The solution has introduced a new feature that helps us identify objects we cannot normally identify. It gives you a fair idea of objects, resolving the object recognition issue. The solution can be used to perform different tests on different machines.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The solution is stable."
"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It can be used with different programming languages."
"It has flaws, but is still much better than any other cross-platform mobile automation tool."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"TestComplete replaced QTP as the preferred choice of tool for the organization; it is much faster, works better across technologies (especially Flex-based UI), and is better compatible with newer technologies directly out of the box."
"The solution helps improve the stability of our product. It also decreases the work of our manual quality assurance engineers."
"TestComplete fits almost almost perfectly with a large amount of stacks, such as Delphi, C#, Java and web applications, making it an amazing feature for companies that want to automate UI tests on each application built in-house."
"The ease-of-use and quality of the overall product are above average."
"Customer service and technical support responsiveness are high. Everyone is very professional."
"Runs in different remote machines. We have multiple versions of the software being tested."
"Test items, project variables helps in managing automation suite and scheduling execution."
"It's cross platform automation capabilities specially ranging across web, UNIX (via putty), and other systems."
 

Cons

"When doing mobile testing Appium is difficult as you can't use it for mobile testing in virtual machines."
"We previously worked with native applications, and there weren't any good mobile app testing tools. We started working with React Native, which works well with Appium, but it would be good to see better integration; the way elements are displayed can be messy. React Native is very popular nowadays, so it's essential to have that compatibility."
"They should add an in-built framework."
"The product was a bit difficult to install. It wasn’t easy. We had issues."
"The last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow."
"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 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."
"The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement."
"Unfortunately, TestExecute does not enable us to select the Tests that has to be executed."
"The learning curve of the solution's user interface is a little high for new users."
"Increased performance with less memory and CPU usage."
"A test case design (schema) module would be nice."
"From my understanding, the product has changed significantly since v5 was released. I don’t know that it has necessarily improved, for my needs."
"The solution doesn't have a very flexible pricing model."
"One issue that I found was that there wasn't a quick way or a button to move Visual Basic scripts to TestComplete."
"The test object repository needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"The solution is open-source."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"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 have a TestComplete 12 license."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable."
"The option we chose was around $2,000 USD."
"The price is less, compared to other products, such as QTP."
"It costs a few hundred per year, but I am not sure. It is not at all expensive as compared to other tools."
"This is a pay-per-use service that is not expensive, and cost-efficient if you have a small team."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"Overall, for us, the cost of the TestComplete platform and the three extra modules is around $8,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business23
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise32
 

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 SmartBear TestComplete?
I am not involved in pricing or licensing; our management team handles these aspects.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
While using SmartBear TestComplete, we are fine with the current capabilities, however, it would be beneficial to improve some performance aspects, especially the image comparison feature. Occasion...
What is your primary use case for SmartBear TestComplete?
We are using SmartBear TestComplete ( /products/smartbear-testcomplete-reviews ) for automation over applications.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.