IBM Rational Test Workbench vs Sauce Labs comparison

IBM Rational Test Workbench

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

IBM Rational Test Workbench and Sauce Labs are both products in the testing automation solutions category. Sauce Labs is more advantageous for its cloud-based testing capabilities which are essential for mobile and web app developers.

Features: IBM Rational Test Workbench offers robust test management, advanced automation capabilities, support for various test automation types, and extensive reporting, making it suitable for complex integration scenarios. On the other hand, Sauce Labs provides a cloud infrastructure with access to thousands of browser and OS combinations, continuous testing, integration support, and scalability, making it ideal for agile teams focusing on quick releases.

Room for Improvement: IBM Rational Test Workbench can enhance its ease of use and simplify initial setup processes. It could also improve cloud-based capabilities and integrate better with non-IBM tools. Sauce Labs could enhance its debugging features further, improve offline support, and offer more in-depth training resources for users new to cloud testing environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sauce Labs features an accessible cloud-based deployment model that reduces infrastructure needs and shortens setup times, alongside responsive customer service. In contrast, IBM Rational Test Workbench involves complex on-premises deployment with longer implementation times, although it provides reliable support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Rational Test Workbench involves higher initial setup costs because of its licensing and deployment requirements but can deliver substantial ROI for enterprises needing robust testing in an IBM environment. Sauce Labs benefits from a SaaS pricing structure, offering flexibility, scalability, and a lower initial investment, potentially delivering a faster ROI for organizations with significant testing demands.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Rational Test Workbench vs. Sauce Labs Report (Updated: April 2025).

IBM Rational Test Workbench vs. Sauce Labs

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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

IBM Rational Test Workbench

Ranking in Test Automation Tools

36th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Performance Testing Tools (19th), API Testing Tools (15th)

Sauce Labs

Ranking in Test Automation Tools

15th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

113

Ranking in other categories

Functional Testing Tools (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Test Automation Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Test Workbench is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sauce Labs is 2.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Test Automation Tools

Featured Reviews

reviewer1513668

IT Specialist, ITE at a government with 10,001+ employees

Good reporting and interface, but supports limited types of protocols and requires low-level script editing

It should have more interfaces. In terms of interfaces or protocols, what you can do with Rational is far limited as compared to other products out there. What it does, it does great, but it only gives you limited types of protocols. It supports between 8 to 15 types of protocols, whereas other test tools give you 20 to 30 types of protocols with which you can do testing and convert to script. It records Javascript-based scripts, and you got to know a little bit of Java to basically be able to edit them, but the level of editing you got to do is very low. I like that, but the ability to edit the script is not as good as Parasoft or LoadRunner, which have C-Script.

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Joel Alonzo

Product Manager - Data & APIs at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees

Metrics about testing across the company are easily accessible, and it's easy to get teams up and running

Multi-domain SSO is a big concern for us right now, especially as we've been merged into a larger company. I suddenly have teams coming from 20 different domains, and because the main master Sauce Labs account is locked down to one SSO domain, there are teams that can't run a test right now. I've heard they're working on a solution and they've been very communicative with us about it. A solution to that would help us a lot. The other issue is that when you're behind a corporate proxy and inside a corporate network, it's a nightmare in general. And the problem that we've come up against over and over again is that a lot of our network staff don't want to open up giant CIDR blocks to internal traffic. Opening it up to one endpoint which is Sauce Labs, through a little API is perfectly fine. That's one IP address and it's no big deal. But for their virtual machines they have one jump box and that jump box contains an entire CIDR block that changes each time the tunnel starts up. In other words, if every call went into one IP and that got bounced back to a load balancer or net gateway, that would help a lot too. When I go to the network team and say, "Hey, we're using a product, a piece of software, and I need an entire CIDR block opened," the first and almost eternal response to that will be "absolutely not." Getting things set up and running is always going to be a bit of a struggle within any corporate environment. Most of that is not Sauce Labs' fault, but the things I just mentioned are things they could do to help deal with that struggle.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Reporting is pretty good. Its interface is also good. I'm overall pretty happy with the functionality and use of IBM Rational Test Workbench."

"This solution provides for API testing, functional UI testing, performance testing, and service virtualization."

"It runs on the cloud, so you don't have physical setups to run all of this."

"Sauce Labs provides us with more combinations to test, so we can keep adding platforms and devices to our network. That's been a very seamless experience. Let's say there's an iOS or a private device we need. Sauce Labs has helped get all those set up when needed."

"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."

"They offer a large number of devices and browser/operating system combinations for real device tests"

"Our machines are mostly Windows. Being able to test with Safari, on a Mac, and other types of browser pieces without having to manage all the infrastructure is the biggest feature that our team enjoys."

"The most valuable feature is cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-mobile device testing."

"One of the most valuable features is that we do not have to have the cross-platform testing vehicles in-house. Sauce Labs gives us the ability to test across platforms and that really helps give us confidence in our products."

"It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%."

More Sauce Labs pros

Cons

"There are a number of things that they can do to simplify the tools, but the most important thing that they need to do is simplify the installation."

"It should have more interfaces. In terms of interfaces or protocols, what you can do with Rational is far limited as compared to other products out there. What it does, it does great, but it only gives you limited types of protocols. It supports between 8 to 15 types of protocols, whereas other test tools give you 20 to 30 types of protocols with which you can do testing and convert to script. It records Javascript-based scripts, and you got to know a little bit of Java to basically be able to edit them, but the level of editing you got to do is very low. I like that, but the ability to edit the script is not as good as Parasoft or LoadRunner, which have C-Script."

"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"

"Another aspect that could be improved is having the virtual devices boot up a little quicker. Sometimes we wait up to a minute before a device is available. It would be nice if that was 30 seconds or so."

"As a web product QA team, we sometimes need to spot check some new child site on multiple browsers and OS(es). It was a little time consuming for us since we need to click on each of the browser/OS combinations and start a new session to test. Every sprint, with new features and child pages being added, we mostly need to do the same steps over and over again."

"The only drawback is the speed, it will be good if we have a server in Asia too. It will be great if we can improve speed while initialization and execution."

"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."

"They should provide a JIRA integration plugin so that we can easily log issues."

"Lacks the ability to start multiple tests simultaneously."

"Another feature that could still be improved on is more error clarity. Sometimes when running automated scripts the test will fail on the device side instead of the script and errors only show a 500 try again message instead of a detailed script that could of a been a timeout error from the code."

More Sauce Labs cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It doesn't really concern me. Licensing is on a yearly basis."

"The pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it is really good."

"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"."

"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."

"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."

"The pricing is definitely on the higher end, and there are other options that are more cost-effective."

"They could improve on the pricing because it seems pretty expensive. I'm sure it's justified, but it's expensive."

"The pricing is reasonable due to the amount of diversity that they provide. However, I feel they might be more flexible to bargain based on their relationship with our organization."

"The number of concurrent VMs that Sauce Labs provides depends on your purchase license level."

"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."

More Sauce Labs pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

32%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Sauce Labs?

It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.

See all answers

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...

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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...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Performance Testing Tools

Download IBM Rational Test Workbench product report

Download Sauce Labs product report

Also Known As

Rational Test Workbench, IBM Rational Performance Tester, IBM Functional Tester, IBM Rational Test Virtualization Server

No data available

Overview

IBM Rational Test Workbench provides a comprehensive test automation solution for mobile applications, regression testing, integration technologies and performance and scalability testing. It helps you build intelligent and interconnected enterprise applications that can be deployed on traditional and cloud infrastructures. With Rational Test Workbench, you can significantly reduce test cycle times, moving integration testing earlier in the development lifecycle.

IBM

Sauce Labs is a functional testing tool that ensures your apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, OS, and device. The solution allows you to automate functional testing on multiple operating systems and browsers, emulating the way that a user would use the website. With Sauce Labs, you can also run tests on various operating system and browser combinations in parallel, reducing the amount of time to get results. The Sauce Labs solution provides enterprise-grade security, scalability, and reliability.

Sauce Labs Features

Sauce Labs has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Automated cross-browser testing
Mobile testing
Secure tunneling protocol
Usage reporting
Enterprise security
Provisioning
Centralized user account management
Access controls
Support for Selenium, Appium, and JUnit Testing

Sauce Labs Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Sauce Labs. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Speed up development time: The solution makes it possible for you to test web and mobile apps in parallel and accelerate your testing time by up to 10x or more. Using Sauce Labs, you can increase developer productivity because your teams will be able to spend less time with test maintenance and debug faster.

No worrying about infrastructure: With Sauce Labs, you don’t have to buy or maintain more servers or mobile devices. You also don’t need to worry about updating browsers or VM licenses. Sauce Labs allows you to easily scale your tests with parallelization to speed up test cycles and boost capacity on their reliable cloud.

Run tests securely: The solution enables you to securely run your scripts and access your data and files from behind your firewall. Sauce Labs generates single-use VMs for every test and destroys them immediately afterwards so your data always remains secure.

Easy integration for your CI systems: Sauce Labs automated testing platform integrates with Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft VSTS, and others so you can test as fast as you develop. In addition, you can share results instantly by using the solution’s simple plugins.

Reviews from Real Users

Sauce Labs is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It has valuable features that include error logging, helpful dashboards, and its browser.

Joel A., Product Manager - Data & APIs at a marketing services firm, says, "The error logging is very robust. If we run a test through Sauce Labs and there's some sort of issue, a log will appear on the screen. Log messages are usually heinous and horrible... Sauce Labs is incredibly good at saying things like, 'Hey, here is the exact issue. Fix this and you can run the test.' That helps in getting things up and running and executing the way they should."

Savio D., Sr. IT Architect at a healthcare company, mentions, "Sauce Labs' dashboards contain multiple useful metrics in one place. Everything is represented to us visually on the dashboard, which helps us understand where to focus our attention, what the issues are, and what we need to resolve."

PeerSpot reviewer, Rob L., Director of Quality Assurance - Shared Service at a financial services firm, writes, “The most valuable feature for us is the browser. The most critical thing is that this software aligns with our Agile and DevOps way of doing things. It integrates with kickoff scripts through DevOps.”

Sample Customers

Financial Insurance Management Corp.

Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.

IBM Rational Test Workbench vs. Sauce Labs