BrowserStack vs. Selenium vs. VMware ESXi

BrowserStack is very useful if you need to troubleshoot a client's reported experience from using an older device or browser version that you do not own and can not personally replicate in-house. For instance, if you are in a Windows environment and your client has a Mac, or if you have iPhones and they have Android. It's also great for ensuring that above-the-fold content is presented effectively across a variety of mobile devices and optimizing visitor experiences. If you are a small business with lower client volumes where these services are needed, then the price point may be high.

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.

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If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!

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• Tests Android and iOS on real devices on cloud, without the need to purchase the devices.
• Run Maestro tests and other frameworks on real devices, reporting the errors to be fixed to developers or the test workflows that failed to the QA team.
• The quality reports at the end of the tests are really good, because they contain videos of the tests being performed on the devices. So, not only text, I can check the behavior of the application exactly how it runs.

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• 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.

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• Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
• Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
• VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.

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• The documentation needs to improve for browser edge cases, such as "approving permissions automatically". There are several "solutions" posted, none of which worked. I needed to go to Discord to get the real solution.
• Documentation in general seems to provide answers that are unclear or flaky
• There needs to be a more reliable way to programmatically choose device, platform, and window size by being able to query a 'plan' endpoint instead of just 'failing the combination.'

• 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.

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• VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
• VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
• I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.

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It's almost the 3rd year for us and it's renewal time for us. So yes, we are already discussing how many licenses we need to increase as users are increasing internally. So it's 100% sure that we are already planning renewal this year as well BrowserStack with live and app automate.

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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.

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It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.

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So many options that it can be a little overwhelming, but the core functions are easy to find and use and it's usually not too hard to figure things out for the more complex tasks. Very easy to boot up a device and a specific browser from the dashboard to begin a manual website test.

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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.

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The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.

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I rated BrowserStack's availability a 10 because it is consistently reliable, with minimal to no downtime or unplanned outages. The platform is accessible whenever needed, ensuring uninterrupted testing. Its robust infrastructure and proactive monitoring ensure a seamless experience, allowing us to meet deadlines without delays caused by availability issues and all

Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.

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The tests are fast considering the fact that they're Appium tests. I've seen tests reliably pass or fail when they're supposed to, with next to zero issues on the BrowserStack side of things. Tests launch only seconds after I kick off them off from my CLI.

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We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.

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I've not had much direct interaction with the BrowserStack support team. The help and community are great and we've not run into any issue that has really required us to reach out. I guess having a stable and easy to use system means you may never need to contact support.

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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 can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.

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Yes, it was online training on meet, and trainer looks like skilled and technical strong, he has covered end to end all the features and he has answers all the queries. because of this trainings we are able to implement it by our own in the organization, thank you for support and training.

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It was a quick training from the support of browserstack, it was nice and easy to understand, thanks again for the support given by the team. and regularly I used to receive mails for training from support for any new feature they launch, I was able to spread same training to all my team and dev.

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I rated the implementation satisfaction an 8 because while it went smoothly overall, there were some challenges during the initial learning phase and integration with existing tools. Key insights include the importance of providing sufficient training upfront and ensuring seamless integration with other systems to minimize disruptions and improve adoption speed.

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.

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Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.

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BrowserStack is simpler and more user friendly than Sauce Labs and can be easily learned by any individual who is new to it and does not require much efforts. Also, BrowserStack is more trusted by the clients that we offer services to, and is always considered the best option among others.

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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.

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As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).

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No Vendors were involved, directly dealt with Browserstack

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it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.

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I may not be the best person to answer this as I am only using it for 1 department and at 1 site but will still try my best As far as Scalability for Devices for Mobile Automation is concerned, it gets a Solid 10, as the users can run cases on upto 10 device parallel and also have the best choices of devices to choose

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We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal

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• Browserstack improved our internal confidence level when it came to signing off on testing
• Browserstack improved the confidence level of our clients by decreasing the number of bugs found during PVT and providing an entry level opportunity for our clients to perform UAT using the same tools.

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• 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

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• VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
• VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
• As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.

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