Amazing, easy to set up product for testing browser and OS compatibility
January 14, 2019

Amazing, easy to set up product for testing browser and OS compatibility

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Solo

Overall Satisfaction with BrowserStack

We utilize it to do heavy cross-browser testing on every single client site we build and support as well as our own primary website. Anything that is currently supported by WordPress and other industry standards is tested, and should we ever have a client issue we request they send us their browser specs and spin up Browserstack to try and replicate the issue. It's exclusively used in the digital department which I manage, and it lets us try and resolve issues quickly without needing to run VMs or find PCs in addition to Mac environments.
  • Allows you to quickly rotate through any browser you may need to test on, including some 'rare' varities
  • Let's you emulate phone software operating systems which is otherwise almost impossible to try and emulate
  • Let's you change viewports to test true responsiveness of digital elements
  • I have very few complaints about Browserstack but often by virtue of the VM it can be slow to load
  • This slow load speed means it's difficult for me to test if my speed and caching plugins are fully functional within the browsers themselves
  • We've been able to reduce the amount of plugins and add on needed in my team's browsers which is great for general use
  • With a single license we no longer need to hunt down older browser versions for testing which can prove almost impossible to find
  • The ability to not only spin up a specific browser but ALSO a specific version of an operating system means that instead of needing a virtual box or multiple machines set up for various combinations, it's all in one place making testing MUCH faster (and letting us increase margins)
I've only ever compared this to other emulators like Virtual Box and the like which require some tech knowledge and time for set up. BrowserStack is ready out of the box and even a non-IT person can start using it almost instantly.
If you need to do basic testing and debugging on a website, it's absolutely wonderful. The phone emulators in particular are critical and I could see this also being useful for app development, assuming you have a sandbox environment that you can test via a URL. It's not as great for doing speed checks on sites vs functionality and layout testing.