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HeadSpin vs Sauce Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

HeadSpin
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
32nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (7th), Mobile App Testing Tools (9th)
Sauce Labs
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
13th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Test Automation Tools (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Functional Testing Tools category, the mindshare of HeadSpin is 0.5%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sauce Labs is 5.9%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Functional Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Saorabh Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
It fulfills everything from automation to manual performance
The most valuable features of the product are the performance parameters it gives us, as well as the seamless connectivity with our automation suites. I am also pleased with the continuous enhancements made to HeadSpin. There have been many features added since we started using the product, and all of them are useful.
AnupKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good stability and robust but lacks generative AI capabilities
Technical support is equally very important. If you talk about anything deployed to production, and the project is live, customers are using that, and they might face some issues, some functional issues. That's when support people play a role in identifying the fix or the incident. Based on that, we create an incident based on the customer defect or whatever. Once the incident gets raised, the support will play a role in working on that particular incident. If it's a code-based incident, administration, or integration issue, support people play a big role in resolving those issues before reaching the exact developers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support is really helpful because we can set up direct calls with them if we want to. We can use Zoom or Google Meet to interact with them directly, and if there is an issue in our system, they will help us by reproducing the issue in their machines and trying to figure out a solution. The support is really smooth, and we like that they're very supportive."
"It has an interesting feature called AV box testing. A lot of companies that are in the OTT segment don't really understand what their streaming is like. They can't test for streaming quality. There are restrictions where you cannot simulate live streaming. For example, on Netflix, you can't simulate how a movie is being streamed on a remote device. That's why HeadSpin has got this AV box testing feature. It is a patented feature. They send an AV box to your location, and you can test live streaming, which is something that no other company does."
"The most valuable feature of HeadSpin it's the integration with other solutions. It is great. I can search for an element or do a quick debugging on the application right on HeadSpin. It's very useful."
"The most valuable features of the product are the performance parameters it gives us."
"The most valuable feature is that this is the first connected intelligence all-in-one platform."
"The initial setup of HeadSpin was very easy and user-friendly. It was easy to configure and write a script."
"It helped to integrate our performance testing and UAT, which helped to deliver a bug free software for our customers."
"The most valuable feature is cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-mobile device testing."
"I like the dashboard and seeing the test results. As a manager, I like to see the insights of the people using it, understanding the total path and run. I can see all of that as a manager. I also know team members love seeing the dashboard and seeing the test results in real-time."
"It provides a comprehensive selection of browsers and platform versions for our test automations and CI/CD pipeline process. It also provides a comprehensive set of virtual mobile devices, which we can configure for our automation and availability. These features are valuable for us when it comes to testing our applications. We have a website and mobile applications that we want to test and diversify to various browsers and mobile devices as well as restore various versions. This helps us to find bugs that users might be facing and correct them."
"The insights section provides a great overall state of the automation suite and can identify trends relatively quickly. If we see a dip in our passing rate over time, we can look at what changed when the test started failing to find the root cause rather than doing a quick fix to find that the test fails a short time later."
"Supplying devices to a testing team of possibly close to one thousand testers and developers is a great undertaking but Sauce Labs has made this very easy and a welcomed solution."
"There is a huge amount of open source, community provided resources."
"With Sauce Labs, we have a whole universe of devices: Galaxy, all the iPhones, and all the operating system versions. All our software developers are able to test on a multitude of different devices."
 

Cons

"If you want to do some testing or check the devices manually or check the application in a particular device manually, it is really laggy. That's a disappointment because sometimes we would like to do manual testing when our local devices are not available."
"HeadSpin needs to improve the hardware. With the mobile, the battery life reduces and must be continuously charged."
"HeadSpin could improve on the user interface because it is very poor. The checks that are done on the iOS devices are very difficult, but for Android, it runs great. For all iOS devices, the user interface and how it interacts with the device are very poor."
"Sometimes, devices go offline and some features are not functioning on some devices, specifically on iOS."
"They should automate their onboarding. A lot of things are still manual. They can create a video assistant or something like that to completely automate the entire process."
"Support and pricing could be improved."
"We encountered minor issues with stability from time to time but Sauce Labs continues to make improvements."
"Integration with Github, as well as several other similar tools, could be improved."
"One of the challenging areas for us is the reporting and the matrix. It should be based on roles, but right now it is only available for the admin role. The admin role can really do a lot of stuff, but our infrastructure team, which holds the admin role, is not ready to hand it over to us on the testing team. If Sauce Labs had permissions associated with roles, where this role could do this activity and that role could do that activity, it would be easier for us."
"Overall, I think Sauce Labs provides us with a valuable tool and resource. As far as what could be improved, I would say the overall test execution time. Some of the calls take a bit longer than I expect, for example in web browser tests; while the execution time isn't obnoxious, it could be improved so that overall tests/test suites finish faster."
"If I had to speak of an area that could be improved it would probably have to be the speed of interaction with the devices. There is at times a considerable amount of lag while using some of the virtual and at times even physical device farm"
"When we were in development, it was a bit of a pain because we have onshore and offshore development. One of our development shops is in India, and we were running tests over there. When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn't have enough licenses. That was during the core development before we even launched."
"We have had some issues with the Sauce Connect Proxy on our Jenkins servers failing to start, which makes the optimal CI/CD pipeline come to a halt."
"The real concern is the load time of applications or real devices when we start our tests. It takes some time to load the application or web browser. Sometimes, it is frustrating too. Since they are real devices, we understand it takes some time to load. However, if it were to improve, then that would be a great asset to the solution. So, we would like better responsive times when opening applications and running tests."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a yearly license. There is no other option. It is expensive. There are a lot of other cheaper players in the market, but it is like a Mercedes. You pay an extra premium for it, but you get the benefits. I would love to see them come up with project-based costing. Companies that are low on funds or new-age can do with pricing that is easily digestible. They can give them a pricing model for three months. They can provide a startup package."
"It's not cheap, but there are a few different packages and different prices for enterprises with different product versions."
"I believe the licensing cost is cheap because it's a total solution, hardware, license and software."
"We have a yearly license for 16 devices."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"When you reach the Enterprise licensing tier, base level being with 10 concurrent test sessions, pricing is essentially per-unit-of-concurrency thereafter with a relatively linear increase and not much benefit for "bulk"."
"Cost-wise, it's decent. If you have to get the base version out of it, it's the best solution to go with. As compared to other cloud service providers, the pricing of Sauce Labs is decent."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
"The pricing is definitely on the higher end, and there are other options that are more cost-effective."
"We pay for a specific number of VMs."
"We have an enterprise account; it has worked great for our needs."
"It could be less like pay-per-use with a lower rate."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Sauce Labs?
It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.
What needs improvement with Sauce Labs?
Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI, which can reduce the human effort in writing test cases. For example, in my current project, we reduced the time it took to complete user...
What is your primary use case for Sauce Labs?
I work as an automation engineer using Selenium WebDriver with Java, and API automation using Rest Assured with Java. I have also worked with Docker integration on AWS. Additionally, I have experie...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Zynga, Tinder, Pinterest, Akamai, Microsoft, Airbnb, Jam City, TMobile, Mozilla, CNN, Cognizant, Yahoo!, ebay, Quora, Walmart, Kohls, Telstra
Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Find out what your peers are saying about HeadSpin vs. Sauce Labs and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.