Appium vs Xamarin

Appium

Appium is well suited when you need to write automation tests with low costs. It's very simple to start up, configure and run. It doesn't depend on the application platform and is portable to many programming languages like Java, Ruby, etc. If you have a team of developers and SDETs and you need to increase the code coverage simply and fast, Appium is your best choice.

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Javier Cardoso

Quality Assurance & Testing Senior Engineer

Mercadolibre.comInternet, 1001-5000 employees

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Xamarin

Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.

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Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development

Internet Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Pros

Offers an excellent user interface application to assist in designing cases by previewing app screens and retrieving names of the elements you intend on interacting with
Provides a generally accessible documentation suite on the web, which you will reference quite often
Handles the connection between Appium's server and Xcode's tools during execution well

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Brian Smith

Test Engineer III

Cox AutomotiveAutomotive, 1001-5000 employees

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Code sharing - I mean, you can do the work in half the time. Great way to release to multiple markets without having to write code twice.
Robust - Basically anything you need on the OS level is available.
Intuitive - Xamarin gives you the capability of a code share project, and then platform specific projects. You can communicate between the two and it makes it very nice to develop in.

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Jordan Max

Software Developer

NewserInternet, 11-50 employees

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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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Randall Kelley

Senior Software Development Test Engineer

SecureAuth CorporationInformation Technology and Services, 201-500 employees

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My only issues really stem from the IOS side, but those are not necessarily Xamarin's issues
Needing to connect to IOS machine
Code signing and deployment with IOS is very cumbersome

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Kyle Kochtan

Technical Lead

Newell RubbermaidConsumer Goods, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

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.

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Deva Veluchamy

Test Automation Lead/Consultant

Aspire SystemsComputer Software, 1001-5000 employees

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Xamarin allows us to natively code against IOS and Android as opposed to just putting a Skin over it. Because of this native code stack the performance on Xamarin is off the charts better. You can really see the performance when you are using native phone features like GPS, Phone or Camera

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Kyle Kochtan

Technical Lead

Newell RubbermaidConsumer Goods, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Open-source tool
No negative impact as investment required only for scripting of test cases

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Deva Veluchamy

Test Automation Lead/Consultant

Aspire SystemsComputer Software, 1001-5000 employees

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Faster development has a direct relation to the number of resources required.
Getting the right resource to work on the project is a challenge as mobile developers are more familiar with Objective C / Java not on.net
Getting the right component for the project is a bit of a challenge.

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