Google Tag Manager vs. TestComplete

I have found Google Tag Manager as the go to solution for managing all of your event and conversion tags for your website. Not only does it make it easy to manage all of your tags in the one place, it is fairly intuitive to use and there is plenty of videos and help documentation online to help set up what ever you need. No scenarios come to mind at the moment on where it is less appropriate to use.

Incentivized

Best suited to smaller unit test or tests broken up, couple of forms at a time Not suited - larger regressions test involving multiple systems. - my main regression involving payments has been unsuccessful for the last 3 years despite all working fine separately and while being watched

• Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
• In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
• Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
• Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.

Incentivized

• Identifying UI objects and application structure
• Expandability of tests through scripts and script extensions/plugins
• low barrier of entry (you can get started quickly, and other's don't need much explanation to contribute on a basic level)
• Possibility of Jira integration for reporting
• Relatively few (and usually easy to solve) git conflicts when working simultaneously
• easy handling of test data, also for iterative tests

Incentivized

• There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
• Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.

Incentivized

• TestComplete could stand to have a simplified view for different types of users. For instance, as a manager/architecture guy, I'm not so interested in getting into the code and am more interested in file-based interactions.
• TestComplete could use more integration with reporting for things like TeamCity to improve test status visibility.

Incentivized

I haven't found another option for us to use especially one that is free. Down the road we may go a different route but for now GTM is a good option and does what we need it to do. It'd be nice to get more support or more integrations but with the free version there's only so much one can expect to get I suppose.

Incentivized

We have bigger test automation pack using test complete at the same time we also think this is not good performing tool for large number of test automation scripts.

Incentivized

No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.

Incentivized

It is usable when you become accustomed to its quirks. Not using it for two months and then you need to re-learn the quirks for some features (but some quirks are so awful that they will never fade from your memory). So, when using it regularly, it is possible to be quite productive, if no big correction in name mapping is needed.

Incentivized

GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.

Incentivized

Some bugs were quickly resolved, but most UX quirks of the tool are just marked "as designed". No follow up for enhancement request.

Incentivized

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.

Incentivized

If you develop a mobile application and your testing process goes in cloud, probably you will face a problem - how to implement a stable connection between your mobile devices and testing servers

Incentivized

We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.

Incentivized

TestComplete stacks up against them in terms of GUI and seamless performance. It records each and every step and action been performed in the application and produces a detailed report in a well-structured manner. It can connect and access seamlessly among various databases directly to speed up the testing process.

Incentivized

• GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
• With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.

Incentivized

• Saves hundreds of man-hours with either QA testing or data entry
• With the small cost of the product, it has saved the company money with both employee costs as well as the cost of mistakes made by human error or software bugs

Incentivized