Appcelerator (discontinued) vs. Appium

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Appcelerator (discontinued)
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Appcelerator was a mobile app development platform acquired by Axway in 2016. It has been discontinued.N/A
Appium
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Appcelerator (discontinued)Appium
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Appcelerator (discontinued)Appium
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
Best Alternatives
Appcelerator (discontinued)Appium
Small Businesses
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Appcelerator (discontinued)Appium
Likelihood to Recommend
1.0
(1 ratings)
7.1
(9 ratings)
User Testimonials
Appcelerator (discontinued)Appium
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However, Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles
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JS Foundation
1. It's open source which supports range of languages, operating systems and languages. Well suited for Android and IOS mobile automation. Supports all kinds of apps, which makes it flexible and robust mobile testing tool 2. It is less appropriate where we need intercept network call to verify the API calls. Extensive coding experience is required to work Appium
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework.
  • Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps.
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JS Foundation
  • It uses WebDriver API so it makes it easy to use for former web test automation engineers.
  • It can be managed via the command line via an extensive set of parameters.
  • It handles implicit waits at the server side that is especially valuable in distributed infrastructure.
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Cons
Discontinued Products
  • It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug.
  • There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things.
  • If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed.
  • It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same.
  • The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow.
  • Documentation needs to be improved.
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JS Foundation
  • Element browser sometimes is unreliable and has sporadic fails.
  • Appium running is a bit slow, compared to tests written with Appium and with Espresso or XCTest.
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Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs. Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.
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JS Foundation
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 language they are more familiar with.
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Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does.
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JS Foundation
  • Appium is open source, so it's free. That's budget friendly right there.
  • The ability to write mobile automation tests has saved considerable time for our manual test team, but that is true with most automation tests.
  • We use Sauce Labs with our other automation, but Appium works great with Sauce Labs, as well, if I needed to run on emulators and simulators.
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