Apache JMeter vs. Sauce Labs vs. Selenium

JMeter is well suited for Java applications where the user can script the scenario once and make changes to accommodate for as many numbers of users for load test execution. The image and selection of any files or exporting files scenario is handled well.

It is less appropriate to test Ajax applications where it is required to script click per use.

Incentivized

Having used some of the competitor's tools over the year I would say that SauceLabs provides a lot of value for money if you plan to run long sets of tests with high frequencies. Paying for a single slot means you can run tests whenever you want without creeping costs but it does make running tests in parallel require an extra slot. Currently, our test suite takes over three hours to run and at the moment it is cost prohibitive to purchase an extra slot. However, having access to live testing and integration with Appium is great.

Incentivized

When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.

Incentivized

• Easy of use - in generate load like HTTP requests, and processing/analyzing the responses. No coding is necessary at the basic level, just need to understand load testing and the infrastructure being tested.
• Automatic management of things like cookies to help with session state support - so you don't specifically have to worry about it or handle it
• Lots of testing/configuration options to suit your needs in making the right load generation (sampling requests), and analyzing the results, including any pre and post processing of the results first. Things like the Beanshell/BSF pre/post processors, response assertion, regular expression extractor, XPath extractor, CSV data set config
• There is a JMeter cloud service called BlazeMeter that I think would be useful for those that need to scale up high load without provisioning their own systems. I've not personally tried it though, but I recently attended a meetup presentation that highlighted nice useful features that BlazeMeter provides. One should evaluate the service if they are considering JMeter and need to expand beyond existing hardware resources.

• Provides a comprehensive selection of browser and platform versions for test automation and CI/CD pipeline support
• Provides a rich selection of browser/platform availability for customer issue reproduction
• Provides a comprehensive set of virtual mobile device configurations for automation and availability
• Sauce Labs' SaaS and self service tools work and perform well

Incentivized

• For any web based UI automation, Selenium is the best tool out there to automate your tests.
• It supports multiple coding languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C# etc.. to choose from.
• There is a huge community of users and can get many answers on StackOverFlow.
• It has lot of other plugins to make your tests even more efficient.

Incentivized

• Jmeter requires many tweaks with respect to its configuration file and thread properties. users need to edit theses files themselves. There could be some interface where we can edit this fields.
• Jmeter cannot handle more threads and hangs up when we increase the number of threads. This causes lot of inconvenience. In these situations, user can be notified that such change would be lead to slow performance so that user can do as required. The same appears when we try to view huge files on graph listener.
• Jmeter should optimize the read and write access to output csv since it acts as overhead to the I/O performance. This affects our test results for the application which we are testing.

• I've had four changes in account managers over the past couple of years. They ranged from super experienced/advocate to some that seems relatively junior/a bit removed. I understand this happens but clarity on what I can expect with these partnerships would be valuable. What I've gotten in the end has varied dramatically.

Incentivized

• Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
• Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
• Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.

Incentivized

Price, Wiki and user sharing. Having access to the information provided by the developers and other open source providers is key for me. The ability to share information and get answers directly is very important to success in software testing. And the price of this product currently is amazing. Too many companies charge way too much money for products that are far behind in their value and pertinence

As we currently know, there's nothing on the market with a big feature set like saucelabs at their current price point. Along with the business not having to learn a whole new tool to use again and the ability to refresh our private devices and the continuously growing number of public devices available and features.

Incentivized

We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.

Incentivized

The purpose related to performance and load testing through Apache JMeter works fine but the usability of the tool should be improved quite a lot. If someone starts with the Jmeter fresh without prior experience, they need to put more efforts in understanding the tool. The UI is not that great which is the main reason not to give high rating on usability.

Incentivized

It is an incredibly easy service to use for what its primary intention is. The only reason a point is deducted is because more feature enrichment can be done around the Sauce Connect Proxy utility and the Jenkins Sauce OnDemand plugin. User Account administration also needs more work, such as the addition of user groups, rather than a simple hierarchy of users.

Incentivized

For those who are unfamiliar with coding, there is a bit of a learning curve. There is plenty of helpful documentation and resources but it can take a little time to get the software up and running. Once you get the hang of how Selenium works, and what it can do, you realize how many things you can use it for, and how many processes you can automate.

Incentivized

Yes, Sauce labs is always there, and it is easy to troubleshoot when you are having any connectivity issue, they always keep you informed when they plan to perform any type of maintenance window on their side in advance, so you can plan and will not affect your current work. I do not recall any outage.

Incentivized

The time where they acquired TestObject and were trying to integrate their services would probably be the most annoying time. Annoying as features were in two separate places (websites) for example. But since the introduction of their unified platform, we haven't run into any issues as of yet and we've used them for at least 5-6 years now.

Incentivized

I have been using JMeter for the last year. By using this tool, you can make sure the system will work under varied loads. It helps us to simulate real time scenarios by creating required virtual users and make sure the application will work under load. Perform load, stress, and stability testing using JMeter.

Incentivized

The people here are just so friendly and personable. For instance, Tristan Lombard answered every single email with a very cheery tone and not only did he diagnose my issue, he also made sure to ask how my day was going. Keep it up

Incentivized

The Selenium app has a pretty fat community of users. For the problems we are experiencing, we are primarily receiving support from these communities. In addition, there is widespread service support. Instant support is given to the problems we experience when we need Online support. We and our team are happy to provide this support, especially before important deployment processes

I am not sure if it's my company that makes getting Sauce Labs integrated into the team difficult or is it Sauce Labs. The process for getting Sauce Labs for a project is quite a tedious process and the information for using Sauce Labs initially is quite lacking. There is little support for getting started

We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.

Incentivized

I have used LoadRunner and Silkperformer, and so far Jmeter turns out be the easiest to use of all these. While each of them have their own ROI, Jmeter can be picked by anyone in hours and start testing within a day. While with other tools, we need to get license, install them (takes a while) and setup tests and firewalls, etc.

We have also tested out Browser Stack, which at the time was more geared towards manual testing. Although it appeared to support more mobile devices/browsers, we also wanted something that can plugin in easily with our existing Selenium test scripts. Sauce Labs was definitely more geared towards our goals at the moment which were to automation functional/regression testing and build it into our release pipeline.

Incentivized

At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.

Incentivized

With private devices, you have full reign over usage of them, so no complaints there. Public devices are available if no one else is using it, which is understandable. Browser VMs are based on number of open sessions and Saucelabs give you a certain number depending on what you need. If you need more, then you pay for more. It is as simple as that. You need more devices, then you can pay for more private ones too. A workaround for public devices is to pick the first available one and not be too picky, that's if you are able to of course.

Incentivized

• Good ROI on improving the performance of the application.
• Finding issues in the performance.
• Benchmark the performance results.
• CON: Need skillset to create and maintain the scripts in Java.
• Scripts are reusable and it is executed by any user.
• Need Client and Server setup to execute the scripts.

Incentivized

• Eh... Negligible? Being on AWS West makes it quite a few hops for us, so the process times out every now and again. That is frustrating.
• I can't really speak to the dollars, as I am not privy to the information.

Incentivized

• There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
• This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
• We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
• We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium

Incentivized