Sauce Labs Reviews

We use Sauce Labs for mostly our automated testing on cross-browser and emulator devices. Our team mainly focuses on web product testing so using a third party vendor to help with the external resouces is a must. There are many cases that we need to run our test on multiple browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge etc. Sauce Labs has all the options for us. Of course, because our products are mostly web based, we need to ensure the cross-browser testing for every release cycle. Instead of doing it manually on many real devices, we use Sauce Labs since they provide many emulator devices.

Sauce Labs has been helping us a lot in reducing the number of manual testing. By moving most of our test to the cloud and not running on the EC2 instance, we not only save time for the service but also the maintenance for the external servers. Sauce Labs is the best out there. They beat their competitors because of its price, customer support, and an amazing forum where you can ask and get answered really quickly. They never stop expanding. Whenever we have a new update for any browser, devices, etc. they make sure it will be in their devices and browsers farm so users can use it immediately.

Live device testing. As we all know, It's really hard and challenging to find/purchase many real devices to test because it will be costly and not all the team can be able to purchase all of the devices out there. We used to have a lot of real devices under our labs. However, it is really time-consuming to maintain those devices and make sure they are up to date with the testing requirements. Sauce Labs knows that and already has a solution for their live device testing which allows us to test our app on the actual devices out there and see the real result.

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. We would like to see if Sauce Labs can be able to open multiple different browsers on the same website at the same time, just by 1 click. It will reduce a lot of time for manually click and change the devices/OS combination.

2+ years.

We rarely had any downtime with Saucelabs, except sometimes our tests cannot connect through the tunnel. It's not always but once in a while and with some random tests only. Their support is really great, they always help us to diagnose and find the root cause of the problem. 

The performance is great, we never had any slowness or trouble with running our tests.

Amazing! They are very quick in response and very throughout. They even go way beyond to help troubleshoot our code and give the coding example to help with all the questions that we had.

We did use another third party vendor for cloud testing. However, their price increased a lot, and their support was a little slower than Sauce Labs. That's why we switched.

It was very easy. They have a wiki and a GitHub repo with all of the codes for every programming language. We can either use their template page or inherit it to our use cases.

We developed our test framework based on Sauce Labs in-house. There was no other vendor team.

We have a team that manages all the licenses, and they share the pool with the rest of us. However, we haven't had any problem of running out of concurrent devices/connection because we agree to not running many test in parallel at the same time.

There are only two big companies in this field and since we were moving away from the other one, we obviously did not consider any other options.

If you are looking for a cloud devices testing provider, look no further. They will beat their competitors on price, support, and a lot more. 

My company uses Sauce Labs to run all smoke and regression tests for our application.

We primarily run our tests on Chrome 83, but we occasionally run on other versions (81 or 84) to check to compatibility. Our smoke suite runs on a nightly build, and regression on a bi-weekly basis.

For building out new automation features, we have to have a passing Sauce Lab run before creating a pull request. Doing this ensures that our new automation features will run on other environments and not just locally.

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.

The visual data is helpful for all levels within the organization from the QE engineer level up to the director level.

The ability to change the browser version has also ensured that our application stays compatible with previous and updated browser versions.

One major feature that I like about Sauce Labs is the recording feature. I love the option to watch a video playback and command and view log when I'm trying to figure out why my test was passing locally but may fail on Sauce Labs. It's helped to make sure of my automation.

Another feature I find valuable is the ability to choose browser versions. This feature allows us to test on our minimum browser version but also check/verify that our application is working on the most recent browser version as well.

The insights tab is also very valuable, as I’ve discussed early; it provides a great deal of data and determines trends in our automation sooner.

From a company use standpoint - I have no complaints. The one issue I have is the 14-day trial that a new user gets for free. I understand the concept of the trial period; however, I think this could be revamped to a free 30-minute run time every few months or after a significant update once the trial period has ended. Personally speaking - I like to maintain my automation framework and would like to occasionally test that it continues to run on Sauce Labs after releases without stealing from Sauce Labs.

I've been using Sauce Labs consistently for a year now since I've started with my company.  After being introduced to Sauce Labs, I've incorporated it into my framework that I maintain.

A previous solution I had used was running a VM from a NAS server to run our automation scripts.

Be sure to plan out your solution before starting the free trial; 14-days goes by rather quickly.

Sauce Labs was already integrated into our framework and SDLC process when I started with the company.  After using it for a year now, I would highly recommend this to anyone.

Our CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) QA Pipeline interacts with Sauce Labs when it goes to run the necessary automated tests. Our automated tests exist for normal web browser tests (we specify to run on the latest Chrome version, on Mac OS) as well as mobile tests where are mobile tests run on various Android and iOS devices to verify that our apps are working properly on multiple systems. We use a 30 VM (Virtual Machine) farm from Sauce Labs, which gives us enough VM's to get through all our tests in a very reasonable amount of time.

I use it to maintain my own VM (Virtual Machine) farm of 25 VMs. The admin time I had to spend on maintenance and upkeep was a few hours per week, coupled with the fact that the up-time on the VMs was probably somewhere around 75% due to issues coming up in off-hours when I wasn't available to due maintenance/fixes/repairs. When I finally moved over to Sauce Labs, all this burden of doing the management was uplifted off my shoulders, and the up-time is nearly 100% for Sauce Labs VMs. On top of that, we can specify from an abundance of device types, OS's, browser versions, etc. when running our tests. Furthermore, the analytics side of things within Sauce Labs has drastically improved over the years and you can dive into your test results (pass/fail) to get a better understanding of how things are working over a period of time. Overall, Sauce Labs has provided us with a VM farm that is virtually always up and running and has taken the burden off of us/myself of maintaining the VM farm.

I have found the live test section with Sauce Labs to be extremely valuable. When you can't quite figure out why a test is failing, you can go to the live test results section within their tool and launch your test (specifying a given OS/browser, or device) manually and step through the test to see the issue more clearly, usually opening up the developer's tool console and watching the network calls and console (within Chrome) to usually find the underlying issue.

I also frequently use the insights section within the tool, to analyze trends of the pass/fail rate of our tests, so I can see what suites of ours are more failure-prone than others, etc. The tool allows you to filter up to the last 30 days' worth of data, along with many other filter options (OS type, tag, build, etc.) so you can really produce insights into your tests.

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.

Within the insights section of the Sauce Labs tool, I think it would be nice if you could go back farther than 30 days worth of data. I like all the custom filters available, but being able to go back say 90 days (or more) would show more statistics on our data/test results.

In the next release, I'd like to see continual new additions of OS's. This area is usually pretty up-to-date, please keep at it!

Five plus years.

Very good, up-time is near 100%.

Very good, you can add Vs if necessary.

We've only usually contacted customer service (our account manager) to add VMs, it's been seamless and pleasant.

Manually maintained my own VM farm. We switched to Sauce Labs as the cost/time to maintain my own VM farm was too high.

Straightforward and easy, with good instructions in their knowledge base.

In-house.

I'd say it definitely provides a good ROI, vs maintaining your own VM farm.

The cost is worth it. Start with a VM farm that you think suits your needs, and then add/subtract VM's if necessary.

We use Sauce Labs for the following:

- Executing automated functional tests across multiple applications in a combination of about 5 browsers/os. These include IE11, Safari (latest), Edge (latest), Firefox (latest) and Chrome (latest).

- Running manual exploratory testing across the same browser mentioned above to get a hands-on view of the application running in each of the environments.

- We use the screenshots and videos to share the bugs or issues found with the teams to assist in the resolution of the bugs.

Sauce Labs has improved the testing side of our organization in the following ways:

Sauce Labs runs a huge number of browser and operating system combinations it allows our teams to worry more about testing our applications than maintaining a combination of browser and os. Either through the Selenium grid or running the browsers locally. In essence, it allows our testers to concentrate on testing the application and not worrying about the infrastructure. It also allows us to target new browsers without the required setup of the new browser.

As stated earlier we use Sauce Labs for a combination of automated testing and manual testing. Therefore the most useful features are the ability to run the functional automated tests via Sauce Labs tunnels which allows access to applications in our internal network. The second most useful feature is the manual side. This allows our testers to quickly identify issues with the look and feel of our apps in the different browsers we support.  I have not had a requirement for mobile testing so cannot advise on that side.

We have used Sauce Labs extensively for the last 5 years across automated and manual testing and have found some problems during this time. Firstly as we use Sauce Labs to connect the tunnel to connect to apps in our internal network we have found that during automated testing this can be very slow. This causes inconsistencies with the tests. It's very difficult to rely on a service when you can't be sure if a test will pass or fail the next time it runs. This means building in a lot of sync time into the tests which in turn slows them down.  If this speed could be improved then the service would be much better.

Approximately 5 years.

The pricing is clear on the site - I would say it is more expensive than some alternatives.

The Primary use caes would be the following :

• Using the device farm and also using the ability to use the virtual and real devices for the purposes of software Quality Analysis testing.
• There are projects that sometimes require a variety of devices to perform software testing on and having the repository of devices to choose from that my company might not have greatly assisted with this use.
• Especially in handling massive loads of users. Since there is virtual emulation as well as device farms with actual devices this allows a great number of devices for a team to test with.

Sauce Labs has been a saving grace for our company. More so in recent years if I'm going by my own personal experience.

When you consider the positive plus points relative to having multiple devices, especially with the recent pandemic being under lockdown as well as just a general work from home situation before. Having Sauce Labs farm has been greatly beneficial to many people within the organization and has helped keep the project turn around time on track.

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.

The most valuable feature is as I mentioned would be the benefit of having mobile devices on hand even if it's virtually so in abundance for our testers In my company. 

Another positive is having an up to date device farm and virtual emulation of devices. The time it takes to allocate and purchase devices on the scale it would normally need is completely deducted from the issues we would have to face from a day perspective or even project-wise. On top of that, having to maintain these devices would be another undertaking and require resources that we as a company do not have to concern ourselves with anymore.

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 farms. While this is absolutely better than not having it situation Sauce Labs certainly would benefit as well as we the user would certainly benefit from gaining a software interaction speed boost. Having it more consistent would be greatly appreciated if the long run. This is the only thing affecting the testing time at the moment and can even be seen as a disadvantage in comparison to having an actual physical device in hand.

i have been using saucelabs for about 6 years or so within the company I work for

Stability-wise it's just okay. The speed of this software needs to improve a lot of possible.

Very good as it has the ability to appeal to a lot of users despite some lagful moments.

Customer service is good. I have personally not had an issue myself but from those that have it has never been anything but positive .

I have not personally used another solution prior to Sauce Labs.

Pretty straightforward for the most part.

We deployed with an in-house team.

In terms of projects, it's per-project basis. So it varies but it certainly has saved time.

I'm unaware if my company has done so but I imagine they did and still chose Sauce Labs as the best option.

It's certainly worth a try if anything . I can confirm it has definitely been a help to myself and the company I work for and it probably will do the same for others. 

Our primary use case is for cross-browser automation. 

One more improvement would be the cost. It would be great if we can get more competitive pricing especially in terms of Real devices. Apart from this, I don't see any drawbacks. I love the support team. The user interface is very easy to integrate. It has solved so many hurdles very easily and my company is very happy.

The most valuable feature is the cross-browser feature, it has many android and iOS devices both simulators and real devices. It's easy to integrate. I also like video recording too. 

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.

We have been using Sauce Labs for 3+ years. 

The stability is excellent.

Scalability is very good.

Highly recommended.

We also evaluated AWS Device Farm.

We use SauceLabs for Mobile, Browser and Backend testing.

Our QA requirement is to test our apps against all major browser platforms including Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Apart  of visual and functional testing of the application components, we also collect network traffic produced by the apps for further analysis. With latest update, accessing har files got supported natively by the SauceLabs.

For mobile testing we leverage Sauce Connect tunnels as we need to connect the application under test to the corporate network and collect the produced traffic as well.

1. Achieved better cross platform test coverage for both Browser and Mobile testing

2. Frontend and Backend testing are now more connected

3. With Sauce Analytics we now use resources in more optimal way and too extensive cloud resources usage is no longer a concern

4. We no longer need to support a huge farm of mobile devices - SauceLabs Real Device Cloud works pretty well for us.

5. In some cases, like peak real device usage, SauceLabs Real Device Cloud doesn't work as well due to the delay required to release devices after testing sessions end

1. Easy scaling to multiple web platforms -> SauceLabs was the cheapest option for us

2. Support of tunneling traffic from the cloud to the enterprise network -> that is just essential for our testing

3. Video recording of tests execution process -> shortened root cause analysis time for use by 30%

4. User groups management and cloud resources consumption control -> now each group of users under our organization has dedicated pool of devices/emulators and concurrent resources access is no longer an issue

1. They still have very slow support and ask many excessive questions before starting to fix the issue.

When we submit tickets in their reporting system, we expect them to start tracking down the problem as soon as possible. Instead, it looks like they ask standard questions just to delay work to a few days. E.g. 
1st day: "Could you confirm you use the latest version" - "Yes, we do"

2nd day: "Ok. Can you then try to run that with extra flag Y and grab the log for us" - "Yes, please, take the log"

<2 days of silence>

5th day: ... - "Guys, is there any progress on that?"

and so on...

Sometimes questions are really unrelated and take time like "Have you read the Getting Started guide?"

2. They still have platform-specific issues, especially on Mobile platforms. They wouldn't affect trivial tests though.

E.g. they have issues related to SauceConnect traffic routing specific to iOS 9 and Android 4.

This affect tests that want to sniff the traffic only though. Please, let me know if you want more technical details.

3. Sometimes they change configuration options (e.g. rename...

E.g. recently they changed desired capability for iPhone Simulator in a way like "iPhone 6 simulator" > "iPhone 6"

That affected multiple tests suddenly. They haven't made any notification about that though.

I believe, for more than 7 years already

Mobile application testing.

Yes, it allowed us to scale mobile testing across the globe.

Cloud availability.

More physical devices.