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Appium vs SmartBear TestComplete comparison

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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
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (10th)
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 (7th), Test Automation Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Regression Testing Tools category, the mindshare of Appium is 2.0%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 8.8%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Regression Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SmartBear TestComplete8.8%
Appium2.0%
Other89.2%
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 get a list that shows all devices that are connected to the system."
"The solution is stable."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The latest versions of the solution are stable."
"Appium is a great tool, and I recommend it."
"We chose Appium for the scalability and the ease of automation for both Android and iOS."
"It can be used with different programming languages."
"I like the app inspector; it's quite a good and useful tool for us, we can use it almost out of the box, it works well on Android, the solution is stable and very scalable, and it is free to use."
"Data driven testing using Microsoft Excel Viewing properties of objects using Object Spy Organizing test runs using the Test Items page of the project editor"
"Price-wise, feature-wise, its ability to integrate with other products, and of course, scalability-wise, it's great."
"Recording and playback of tests were easier with SmartBear TestComplete...It is a scalable solution."
"Test automation with TestComplete significantly (estimated 80%) reduced the regression timeline for a complex AUT with a large number of test cases."
"For us, the automated test farm of 20 virtual machines for execution, 20 TestComplete licenses and 20 automated testers are doing the job of 100 manual testers."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure DevOps."
"After NPAPI was unsupported by Chrome, our test runs were halted on Chrome for a previous version of TestComplete, and they started running again with version 11.11."
"I used different solution afterwards and I can say there is no other product with such great flexibility."
 

Cons

"Configuration-wise, there is a lot of room for improvement."
"Appium is not that scalable, if you're using real devices locally."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"The tool needs to add a dependency manager."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The licensing costs are a little bit high and should be reduced."
"During the distribution of our regression test cases, the control IDs are not always recognized correctly."
"Technical Support: Not so helpful most of the times. They always fail to produce a work around."
"The initial setup of SmartBear TestComplete was complex."
"There is no support for mobile testing automation."
"Customer Service can be slow to respond to electronic forms of communication and they do not have a way for a customer to speak directly to customer support."
"The web testing framework of TestComplete is not very helpful for an Automation Engineer; it requires the same effort as Selenium, and in most cases, Selenium proves to be a better testing tool for web-based testing."
"There is a problem with usability because the speed decreases, which could be an issue with scalability because of too many hits on the site."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"This is an open source solution so it does not cost anything for licensing or otherwise."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"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 costs a few hundred per year, but I am not sure. It is not at all expensive as compared to other tools."
"My advice so far, is that while it’s not quite as powerful and easy to use as UFT, its price tag more than makes up for it."
"Buy modules on demand. If you have a four-person team and they will each automate tests only 25% of the time, it's better to buy a floating licence and share the tool during the work day."
"The solution's pricing is too high."
"The license price for a physical machine is cheap, and for virtual machine, it is very expensive."
"Overall, for us, the cost of the TestComplete platform and the three extra modules is around $8,000."
"It comes with a high cost."
"SmartBear TestComplete is an expensive tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
 

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: September 2026.
914,262 professionals have used our research since 2012.