Appium vs. SpecFlow

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Appium
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
SpecFlow
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
SpecFlow is an open source BDD for .NET. that aims to bridge the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.N/A
Pricing
AppiumSpecFlow
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppiumSpecFlow
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppiumSpecFlow
Considered Both Products
Appium
Chose Appium
Most of mobile testing tools which are available in the market are paid license tools. But Appium is Open source mobile testing tool. We can create customised automation framework using Appium. It also supports various languages such as Java, Javascript etc. And also supports …
Chose Appium
The main reason we selected Appium is that we had people experienced in WebDriver API and some framework solutions in place, so given our setup, it provided a faster and cheaper kick-off. Another reason we selected Appium was that SauceLabs had pretty good support for Appium …
Chose Appium
Appium is a wrapper of selenium and is available for mobile based applications. It has also the similar features as selenium has for website automation. Together both provide a combined solution for automating web and mobile apps. Can provide end to end automation with a …
Chose Appium
Appium is comparable with Calabash because it's the only cross-platform tool like appium. Espresso is only to automate Android tests and XCTest is only for iOS. We selected Appium because it solves a lot of automation situations and gestures of the mobile apps. We've used …
Chose Appium
If you're an Apple developer, you use Xcode. It's practically a forced necessity. For system testing though, it doesn't have to be. You can have your development team focus on unit and integration tests in their platform and another team automate acceptance tests with a …
Chose Appium
Hard to compare Appium to Xcode and Android sdk because Appium uses them, but those are the only comparisons I could come up with to compare Appium with another product. I'm sure there may be other mobile automation tools, but none are as mainstream as Appium or with the …
Chose Appium
Appium is one of the most valuable fully featured open-source tools with good support for iOS and Android mobile automation which cannot be matched even by enterprise tools.
Chose Appium
I have not used any other product that compares to Appium in the realm of mobile automated testing.
SpecFlow
Chose SpecFlow
SpecFlow is .Net based which supports C#.
Behave is Python based.
Cucumber is Java based.
Best Alternatives
AppiumSpecFlow
Small Businesses
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
BrowserStack
BrowserStack
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
ReadyAPI
ReadyAPI
Score 6.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
ignio AIOps
ignio AIOps
Score 8.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppiumSpecFlow
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppiumSpecFlow
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium works well for well-structured mobile applications test automation that is particularly easy to leverage when different pages of the app use similar building blocks. If it takes time for some content in the app to be rendered, ask your dev team to add progress indicators and ensure they are accessible. That might be more complicated to do with Appium, though, if there's no good contact with Dev team established so you can request accessibility IDs added quickly enough when needed. Appium supports another locator strategies as well though (such as xPath or iOS class chain on iOS) but they wouldn't work as fast so you may get really slow tests.
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It is best suited for implementing the automated test cases in a human readable form so it's easy for non-technical members of the team and stakeholders to understand the test cases, features and the functionalities of the application. Automation of Integration tests and End to End tests are good use case. It is less appropriate or situations where the focus is only on the writing and maintenance of unit tests.
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Pros
  • Crossdevice: With Appium you can automate tests for Android and iOS both. There is no need to learn more than 1 language.
  • Easy: It's really easy to configure and use appium; it's very useful when you're testing strategy is based on "developers write tests".
  • Open Source: It's such a nice strength of appium, because you don't need to pay to use a good tool like Appium is.
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  • Versatility to be used in combination with different kinds of automated testing like automated performance testing, API testing, UI testing etc. I use JavaScript, Selenium, C#, email testing libraries, database testing libraries in combination with BDD with SpecFlow. I am able to use all these with SpecFlow to make my automation framework to be able to automate any kind of automated testing.
  • It provides different widely used runner options like NUnit, XUnit etc. Before I started to work on establishing proper test automation in my workplace, the previous automation framework (non-BDD based) as well as unit tests used NUnit runner. The transition to using BDD was smooth because we could use the same runner and there were no compatibility issues.
  • The auto-complete feature is good. I use it with Visual Studio as well as Rider and I don't have to recall the entire Gherkin statements. I just type a few words and the entire Gherkin statement implemented in framework is auto-suggested by SpecFlow. It saves time and context switching.
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Cons
  • There are a number of expected methods that are not implemented, yet. With a similar sounding name as Selenium with similar functions, people who are familiar with Selenium try to use methods that appear to be available, but give a "not yet implemented" exception when run.
  • Documentation can be confusing.
  • Setup was a difficult process. This may not necessarily be the case once you figure everything out, but the whole figuring it out process was difficult and I ran into many, many problems when I first started.
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  • SpecFlow does not accepts optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation. Cucumber supports optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation.
  • The tests identified while using SpecFlow with NUnit removes all white spaces in the scenario names. It makes the tests less readable. If the white spaces are not auto-removed, it would be much better for readability as well as their actual identification in the repository.
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Likelihood to Renew
I am rating 10/10 because Appium can use with multiple programming languages with multiple Test engines. Also, it works for both Android and iOS.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
I would like to give 9/10 rating to Appium because of it can easily integrate with popular frameworks and CI/CD tools, as well as it is reliable, flexible and easy to use. The setup can bit complex in initial step, but once on configured it's very easy to use and enables stable and scalable mobile automation for real and cloud devices.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Most of mobile testing tools which are available in the market are paid license tools. But Appium is Open source mobile testing tool. We can create customised automation framework using Appium. It also supports various languages such as Java, Javascript etc. And also supports various operating systems such as Android, IOS etc. We can easily integrate Appium frameworks with CI/CD [Jenkins, Git etc].
Read full review
SpecFlow is .Net based which supports C#. Behave is Python based. Cucumber is Java based. Ghost Inspector is no-code based but provides very limited testing features. We wanted to implement BDD so we rued out using Ghost Inspector. Most of the developers in my team are C# experts so it was decided for everyone's comfort to go for SpecFlow rather than Behave or Cucumber. It's import to have technical experts in the language of the automation framework because there are many situations where the solutions to the test automation needs are not straightforward and implementing those requires expertise in the related programming language.
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Return on Investment
  • For cost of ownership, the increase is positive times infinity, as it's free to install and use
  • Lead time for suite development can be a negative, if not planned for during sprint planning
  • Using Appium to execute tests in parallel across a cloud solution can improve CI/CD cycles by 100's of a percent
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  • Everyone stays on the same page regarding the behavior of existing functionalities whether it be technical or non-technical individuals. So there is less need for multiple people to get involved which saves time and thus money.
  • Reusing the same code through the implemented Gherkin statement saves test automation time and thus reduces cost.
  • We combine SpecFlow with other opensource testing technologies to make our automation framework more versatile which further saves costs for us.
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