Sauce Labs vs. Selenium vs. TestComplete

Having used some of the competitor's tools over the year I would say that SauceLabs provides a lot of value for money if you plan to run long sets of tests with high frequencies. Paying for a single slot means you can run tests whenever you want without creeping costs but it does make running tests in parallel require an extra slot. Currently, our test suite takes over three hours to run and at the moment it is cost prohibitive to purchase an extra slot. However, having access to live testing and integration with Appium is great.

Incentivized

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.

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

• Provides a comprehensive selection of browser and platform versions for test automation and CI/CD pipeline support
• Provides a rich selection of browser/platform availability for customer issue reproduction
• Provides a comprehensive set of virtual mobile device configurations for automation and availability
• Sauce Labs' SaaS and self service tools work and perform well

Incentivized

• 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.

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

• I've had four changes in account managers over the past couple of years. They ranged from super experienced/advocate to some that seems relatively junior/a bit removed. I understand this happens but clarity on what I can expect with these partnerships would be valuable. What I've gotten in the end has varied dramatically.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

As we currently know, there's nothing on the market with a big feature set like saucelabs at their current price point. Along with the business not having to learn a whole new tool to use again and the ability to refresh our private devices and the continuously growing number of public devices available and features.

Incentivized

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.

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

It is an incredibly easy service to use for what its primary intention is. The only reason a point is deducted is because more feature enrichment can be done around the Sauce Connect Proxy utility and the Jenkins Sauce OnDemand plugin. User Account administration also needs more work, such as the addition of user groups, rather than a simple hierarchy of users.

Incentivized

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.

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

Yes, Sauce labs is always there, and it is easy to troubleshoot when you are having any connectivity issue, they always keep you informed when they plan to perform any type of maintenance window on their side in advance, so you can plan and will not affect your current work. I do not recall any outage.

Incentivized

The time where they acquired TestObject and were trying to integrate their services would probably be the most annoying time. Annoying as features were in two separate places (websites) for example. But since the introduction of their unified platform, we haven't run into any issues as of yet and we've used them for at least 5-6 years now.

Incentivized

The people here are just so friendly and personable. For instance, Tristan Lombard answered every single email with a very cheery tone and not only did he diagnose my issue, he also made sure to ask how my day was going. Keep it up

Incentivized

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

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 am not sure if it's my company that makes getting Sauce Labs integrated into the team difficult or is it Sauce Labs. The process for getting Sauce Labs for a project is quite a tedious process and the information for using Sauce Labs initially is quite lacking. There is little support for getting started

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.

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 have also tested out Browser Stack, which at the time was more geared towards manual testing. Although it appeared to support more mobile devices/browsers, we also wanted something that can plugin in easily with our existing Selenium test scripts. Sauce Labs was definitely more geared towards our goals at the moment which were to automation functional/regression testing and build it into our release pipeline.

Incentivized

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.

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

With private devices, you have full reign over usage of them, so no complaints there. Public devices are available if no one else is using it, which is understandable. Browser VMs are based on number of open sessions and Saucelabs give you a certain number depending on what you need. If you need more, then you pay for more. It is as simple as that. You need more devices, then you can pay for more private ones too. A workaround for public devices is to pick the first available one and not be too picky, that's if you are able to of course.

Incentivized

• Eh... Negligible? Being on AWS West makes it quite a few hops for us, so the process times out every now and again. That is frustrating.
• I can't really speak to the dollars, as I am not privy to the information.

Incentivized

• 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

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