Sauce Labs Reviews and Pricing

it_user205212

Software Testing Architect at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 10, 2015

Since using Sauce, our team is able to focus on automating more processes, expanding, and new industry standards.

Setting up and maintaining internal VMs was difficult and was wasting hours of developer time. Our full stack regression process involved manual testing that took up to a week to complete. Traffic continued to increase, so the team set out to automate the processes. We knew our testing tool needed to scale with us, work cross-platform and on any OS, be easy to use, and provide detailed post-test reporting to enable us to diagnose failures. When our testing responsibilities expanded to include mobile apps on iOS and Android, we knew Sauce was a natural fit.

Sauce Labs’ videos, screenshots, and in-session debugging tools have enabled employees to work together in different cities. It’s a big part of what allows me to work remotely and to continue to easily communicate with my team. We can troubleshoot together using video, so the process is almost instantaneous. Since using Sauce, our team is able to focus on automating more processes and expanding best practices and new industry standards such as mobile CI.

Recently we’ve started to use Appium, a cross-platform mobile automation framework, and are in the process of pulling their mobile apps into Jenkins. Currently, Github commits kick off their mobile regression tests that run on Sauce and they’re working on integrating those test results into their feedback loop. For mobile in particular, Sauce is great. We’d face a lot of problems if we had to maintain a functional mobile lab on our own. Lastly, having access to every version of every browser has an added benefit of making onboarding easy. There isn’t a long set up process for new team members’ VMs any more. There’s no need to debug unique issues on each new laptop. We just use Sauce Labs, and it’s smooth sailing. Sauce enables us to do our mobile app testing as easily as we do our web testing.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.

it_user182622

Software Delivery Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jan 19, 2015

Download

Helps me scale my automation environments

What is most valuable?

I find the API to integrate with my script runner invaluable. I can annotate jobs and get results to display in my CI server. For more complicated scripts, the secure tunnel is extremely useful when automating a 'private' application.

How has it helped my organization?

Running WebDriver scripts in house for a single, or few browser combinations is easy but once we started to scale up both in terms of browsers and parallel execution maintaining the grid became a pain so we offloaded it to Sauce. Now we have more combinations that we had before and don't have to worry about scaling our script execution ourselves.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Before starting to use Sauce, we used an internal Se Grid running on a mix of local machines and both local and cloud VMs. The upkeep needs to keep the machines patched and healthy became increasingly a burden -- especially with a run of bad luck with AWS saying that instances were being shut down due to 'performance degradation'.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide

Sauce Labs

May 2025

Free Report: Sauce Labs Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Sauce Labs. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

it_user180798

QA Manager at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 12, 2015

Download

Fast, scalable, flexible, reliable in-the-cloud-Selenium

Valuable Features

The on-demand provisioning, the multiple operating system and browser choices (including multiple versions), as well as the really nice screenshots and videos, as well, are key.

Improvements to My Organization

Having full logs, with videos and screenshots, has really helped us work more closely within our own team, as well as, more importantly, being able to show developers (automatically!) what the precise problem is.

Use of Solution

Since around August of 2011

Deployment Issues

Integration with Sauce has been a breeze for us here at Mozilla.

Stability Issues

At various times, there are high-latency launches, or outright timeouts, but the Sauce Ops team has been pretty good about both 1) acknowledging the issue/investigation 2) working steadily to resolve it.

Scalability Issues

At times, the brief outages or slow service responses have temporarily hampered our fairly large (in terms of concurrency) test-automation runs, but that's not very often.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

Sauce support has been very helpful -- always friendly, pretty prompt, and thorough, too -- even when it's not always a direct problem with their service or our usage of it.

Technical Support:

For our needs, the customer service and technical support come through the same channel, and we've been very happy with the level and quality of responsive support we receive.

Initial Setup

Being an open-source organization, we wrote our own custom plugin to handle integration of both our in-house Selenium Grid as well as Sauce Labs (https://github.com/mozilla/pytest-mozwebqa), and although I didn't personally do any of that coding work, can attest that the APIs Sauce provides have made it pretty easy for us to do that integration and setup work.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

We are lucky to enjoy Sauce Labs's "Open Sauce" program, as an open-source, not-for-profit organization: https://saucelabs.com/opensauce

Other Advice

As a disclaimer, I have done a number of Selenium Meetups with Sauce Labs, as well as a few blog posts which have covered our usage of the service, as well as, finally, authored a Featured Customer case study, in which I expound on nearly all the points I've made here:

https://saucelabs.com/customers

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user176430

Chief Arrgonaut at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Dec 30, 2014

Download

Selenium without the fuss

What is most valuable?

Turn-key access to any browser/OS combination I need

Video recording with permalink to the test job

How has it helped my organization?

I've been able to help numerous companies get up and running with Selenium quickly thanks to Sauce Labs.

For how long have I used the solution?

4 years

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Support is friendly and responsive.

Technical Support:

Solid.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Local execution and a small number of virtual images. Switched because it became too onerous to support.

How was the initial setup?

For a technical person, it's pretty straightforward.

It can be complex given the nature of Selenium and integrating with a third-party platform. But once you understand the fundamentals of Selenium and Sauce, it's simple enough to connect your tests to their infrastructure and capture the results for your own reporting needs.

What about the implementation team?

I help companies implement Selenium. When implementing Sauce (which is a given unless there are constraints that prohibit it) I either update their existing test code to work with it, or implement my open source Selenium framework for their testing needs (http://github.com/chemistrykit/chemistrykit) which comes with Sauce support built-in.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user175704

Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 26, 2014

Download

Excellent solution for running functional and unit tests in browsers

Valuable Features:

Video recording / screencasts
Very fast response from customer service
Mobile Web, and Native Mobile Support
Can handle massive amounts of parallel tests
Manual testing sessions
In-browser unit tests

Improvements to My Organization:

No longer have to manage VMs for testing. No more browser upgrading and dismissing dialogs and windows that stack up.

Use of Solution:

2 years

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user174360

Sr. QA Automation Engineer with 51-200 employees

Dec 23, 2014

Download

Video recording feature is tremendously helpful. It helps me debug and find defects quicker.

What is most valuable?

They have a video recording feature which I find tremendously helpful. It helps me debug and find defects quicker. When I see something fails, it shows me the video of the failed part, the video playback feature is amazing.
Easy to setup.
Very responsive. Get back within the same day – overall great company.

How has it helped my organization?

My company was doing manual testing, I came in and built a framework using Sauce Labs; now it takes less than an hour for regression testing. Easy integration, increased the amount of codes that go out. I used to have to write the tests and perform manual tests; Sauce Labs, has changed all that.

What needs improvement?

Documentation is pretty extensive, but at an advanced level could be a bit better. But they are always helpful. Besides that everything is great, they help out right away, so nothing is a big deal.

For how long have I used the solution?

About three and a half years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues at all with the product's stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Very good, highly scalable product.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

They are amazing. Always get back to me, follow up, everything is amazing.

Technical Support:

They are amazing. Always get back to me, follow up, everything is amazing.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously I used my own virtual environment – had to create and manage it on my own, now I don’t have to worry, infrastructure, setup, anything, Sauce Labs does it all for me.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward for me.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented in-house.

What was our ROI?

In terms of value, we increased our release cycle to twice a week as opposed to once every two weeks – so its doubling productivity.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did. I looked at BrowserStack. Did not have video-playback, which is tremendous for finding bugs and code.

What other advice do I have?

I think its excellent and everyone should get it – I recommend it to everyone. No brainer. Nothing else like it out there right now.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

it_user174462

Sr. Engineering Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Dec 20, 2014

After moving more tests to Sauce, the team was able to reduce testing time from 30 days to 3 days.

We attempted to host and run an in-house Selenium grid in 2012, but we had several failures and false positives that arose from our unstable Selenium grid versus their code. While some failures were due to normal challenges associated with a grid running hundreds of nodes, others were due in part to low familiarity with Windows, since our company’s primary focus was UNIX and Linux that year.

After initially experimenting with Sauce Labs, I automated a handful of tests. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have to manage Windows boxes, browser versions, and security settings for Windows machines. Because virtually no one on my team had Windows experience at the time either, I knew Sauce would be well received.

In a startup environment, often everyone reinvents the wheel with their favorite tool, and then you have to support multiple tool chains. We found no backlash when it came to Sauce, however. Every developer and QA person said, ‘this is amazing.’ Within a week everyone was using Sauce. I turned off our Selenium grid and deleted the VM that it was running on. After moving more tests to Sauce, the team was able to reduce testing time from 30 days to 3 days, a time savings of over 99%.

Our test and development environments are highly automated. QA testing is complicated because of its large matrix of supported operating systems. We use 400 to 600 UNIX, Linux, and Windows VMs to run more than 1,000 UI tests in parallel. In addition to these VMs, we use 20 machines from Sauce to run 20 test suites in parallel continuously with Jenkins, a popular CI system. We use Sauce Connect to work behind our secure firewall, and Sauce is the final check for quality across all browsers.

I do not want my team spending time on browser or image maintenance. It’s too expensive and it changes too quickly. I love that Sauce handles that for us. 40 engineers currently use their Sauce Labs account. Our large team finds the video debugging tool extremely helpful as it aids communication. With Sauce, we experienced an epiphany. It works right out of the box by recording video so we don’t have to look at log files. It helps us debug instantly.

Sauce immediately allowed my team to scale our testing from literally the day we rolled it out. It also allows me to access browsers I hadn’t thought about using previously, such as Safari and older versions of Internet Explorer, which would have required the team to manage infrastructure they were not equipped to do. We’re not browser savvy. Avoiding this, thanks to Sauce, is a huge win.

To achieve the same results in-house we get by using Sauce, we’d need to employ several systems engineers to set up and maintain the grid, for a total cost of approximately a half million annually in headcount. Lastly, avoiding the hassle of managing unfamiliar systems has helped retain top engineering talent within my team. If you tell your team of UNIX and Linux people they’ll have to maintain Windows systems for IE use, that could be an issue for some folks. So I think I saved people from leaving because Sauce handles this for us. Sauce allows me to deliver a robust and sophisticated UI testing infrastructure with very little work.

it_user174312

QA Director at Bridgetree

Dec 19, 2014

Download

Sauce labs enables speed to market and supports continuous integration

What is most valuable?

In my previous company, we used Sauce Labs to enable the team to test with various operating systems and browsers without having to own each of them.

How has it helped my organization?

Their product gave us the ability to run multiple teams of testers across the various platforms that would be used by our customers without having to physically have the infrastructure in place. This drive our movement into continuous integration and the ability to test earlier in the cycle.

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

over a year

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No. It was very easy to install and implement from day one.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer service from the initial query to sauce labs to the product evaluation to contract negotiations to purchase and installation was seamless. They are so accommodating and easy to work with and this allowed us to go from initial discussion to implementation in what I would consider one of the shortest timeframes I've seen with a new product. And I have seen many products in my 21+ year career.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

It was very easy and we were up and running the product the same day.

What about the implementation team?

Purchased and implemented directly through Sauce Labs.

What was our ROI?

High but I cannot disclose value.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Very low but cannot disclose amount.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?