Sauce Labs - Saucy Testing
Updated November 21, 2017
Sauce Labs - Saucy Testing
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sauce Labs
We use Sauce Labs to provide testing capabilities across a wide range of platforms and devices. We could not keep up with purchasing and maintaining multiple devices and sharing them amongst a large number of developers. Sauce Labs provides us with a good cross-section of recent and older devices. It is used within part of the developer community.
- Fairly wide range of platforms and devices
- Support is available from real people
- Many examples of usage and integrations are available on the internet
- Better debugging and developer tools are needed
- Speed can be an issue, sometimes it is painfully slow
- Can be slow to add new devices to a list
- Quality of our products have improved
- Speed to market has improved to a small extent
- Developers are producing more testable code
Sauce Labs' strengths lie in the integrations already available with other systems, and in their support. Their weaknesses are in the speed of their emulations and with the absence of mobile debugging tools, some of which are simplicity itself in BrowserStack. Selection was made on the need for integration into a release workflow and the local support availability.
Evaluating Sauce Labs and Competitors
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
The most important factor to us in choosing Sauce Labs was the responsiveness of the support staff during the evaluation and sales process. They were willing to provide a substantial extended trial and provided access to resources who assisted with the integration of Sauce Labs into our development workflow. We had experience of other vendors being unresponsive or claiming certain features were present when they were not. Sauce Labs were clear in what their product offered.
I don't think we would change our evaluation process. It was appropriate at the time of evaluating the product. If we were looking at similar tools now, there may have been a different outcome as the offerings available have expanded and some other tools may have taken the lead in our scoring process. At the time Sauce Labs was the strongest contender.
Using Sauce Labs
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Manual testing is particularly easy. Choose your platform and start the test. You can also invite other users to view the live test from their own browser.
- User administration is straightforward. Users are added in a hierarchy and there is little in the way of user options to complicate things. Users can be directly added or invited to join.
- Developer tools. Unlike a major rival which has cleanly integrated tools, it is practically impossible to attach a debugger to many Sauce Lans sessions, due to how the VM and virtual device is set up.
- Real device testing. Promised during evaluation as 'coming soon', this really only materialised as an optional extra subscription after Sauce Labs bought another company offering real devices. Disappointing.
- Setup of the Sauce Connect tunnel. This command-line tool gives little feedback on what's going on if there is an issue, and cannot be run properly as a system daemon.