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Maintenance? What’s that? No such thing with Sauce Labs!
Updated August 03, 2022

Maintenance? What’s that? No such thing with Sauce Labs!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud
  • Sauce Labs Core Platform

Overall Satisfaction with Sauce Labs

Allows testing across all phases of development by all members of a cross functional team. Easy to access and use by all with little knowledge of Sauce Labs via the UI. Solves: Maintenance costs of devices including upgrades, software updates, malfunctions. Device shortage via use of public devices. Device sharing and collaboration. Access to devices during pandemic.
  • Range of devices are almost endless.
  • Combination of OS, Browser and browser versions are more than satisfactory.
  • Logs of every type at your fingertips.
  • Updates to the core could be better communicated.
  • Documentation can be outdated in certain places. Like broken links or now irrelevant.
  • Chat function would be nice as support even if it's a bot.
  • Eventually, our actual in-house devices would no longer be needed, where we’ve already stopped purchasing new devices.
  • A bit extra investigation needed. Device usage metrics must be gathered both on the Saucelabs side as well as our users so we can get a clear understanding of what devices we need so that each time we refresh our private devices, we get the ones in high demand

Do you think Sauce Labs delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Sauce Labs's feature set?

No

Did Sauce Labs live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Sauce Labs go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Sauce Labs again?

Yes

Well suited: You know which set of core devices you need as a company which would then become your private devices. Also the ability to swap devices for new ones annually is most useful and cost efficient. Other devices that are used less often can then be used from the public set of devices. Not quite suited for the scenario where speed and framerate are the utmost importance.

Sauce Labs Features & Support

Evaluating Sauce Labs and Competitors

Yes - We had Saucelabs replace TestObject. Simple reason is that Saucelabs acquired them and made them part of the Sauce platform. All the features were migrated onto the Sauce platform (took a while longer than I'd wanted to be honest) with the added ability to access Saucelabs' desktop browsers via their virtual machines. It was a no brainer really as the cost stayed very close to what we had with TestObject originally.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
For us, we came from TestObject, which was acquired by Saucelabs. Pricing staying very close to what we originally paid for TestObject alone, but with the added benefit of desktop browsers.

Saucelabs is very well known in the industry, so with a community backing and great documentation, it was worthwhile making the jump.

As mentioned before in the previous parts, features are constantly being added to Saucelabs and they always have a habit of letting you know when they are available (via their UI), which is great!
At the time, we tried and tested many of competitors. But given that most of the competitors had less features with a higher cost, it was a no brainer for us to migrate from TestObject to Saucelabs since there was no added learning curve (due to the acquisition) and not much of a change in cost.

Using Sauce Labs

30 - Cross functional development teams which consist of a mixture of QAs, backend developer and frontend developers. As you can imagine, Saucelabs is more utilised by QA, Frontend developers and backend developers, in that order. External of the teams like product owners or directors would make more use of the video features, like for example, sharing a test run which contains gameplay and/or tests running on a browser.
3 - We have a small QA only team which supports with all things QA across the business. This team drives the direction of QA across all departments and provide not only Saucelabs support but support of our in house QA frameworks and technology. Saucelabs is fairly straightfoward to use, especially for manual QAs, so support is usually for automation and/or admin.
  • to replace real devices - no maintenance, purchasing, selling required
  • the ability to visually show test runs to stakeholders and non technicals
  • the ability to easily debug failed test runs
  • monitoring systems which spawn up a browser/device to ensure uptime is as expected
  • Not known as of yet. More features added in the future by Saucelabs may change this
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.

Sauce Labs Implementation

Sauce Labs Support

ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Quick Initial Response
None
Immediate support via an appointed sales rep via a Slack chat. But be prepared that they are not technical and can only help with basic support. Anything technical would be directed to a dedicated support team, but the solutions architect is usually available via Slack, so quite easy to get a hold of him for quick fire questions.
No. Did not need it since we are technical ourselves and are able to debug most of the issues we come across.
Probably a good thing, but haven't needed urgent support.

The times that we did raise a few things, the response time is fairly fast (within 24 hours). But then again, it was never for anything major.

Using Sauce Labs

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Inconsistent
The main use case of browser/device testing, be it manual or automation, is fairly easy to get started. The front end UI for manual testing is very intuitive and a non technical can easily just spawn up their needed browser/device. Automation is easy to setup, be it Java or Javascript where existing sauce bindings can be imported to quickly get setup.
  • Launching a browser/device manually or through code
  • Reviewing test runs through video and Webdriver comms list
  • Sharing a session through the UI via a link
  • USB remote debugging isn't straightforward
  • device usage metrics is non existent or I can't find it
  • Individual level usage is fine. But would like to see usage at a team level. i.e. ability to generate a team access key
Yes, but I don't use it

Sauce Labs Reliability

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.
I think there was only one occasion where we couldn't access our devices, but other than that, Saucelabs has always been up and running for us.
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.

Relationship with Sauce Labs

We are assigned our own sales representative or contact point, so any questions we had we could go to them. They were also placed in the same country as our business, so before the pandemic hit, we were able to always meet up to discuss things like our renewals or changes to our devices etc.
As stated before, our owns contact point and slack chat.
Since we were the original users of TestObject, of which they acquired, we were able to migrate our devices over from when we had a contract with TestObject as well as gain usage of Saucelabs' VMs for a very little increase in price. Turns out we use VMs more than we thought we would.
Just lay out your requirements as a business. Explain what you'd need devices/VMs for and at what scale and the Saucelabs rep would be able to recommend what's best for your in terms of browser sessions and devices that you'd need.

Upgrading Sauce Labs

  • The two VM and real devices side being viewable on one platform (Unified platform)
  • Easier navigation and browsing through both real devices and VM browser runs
Yes - Not that it was a different edition, but it was their unified platform that integrated together their own VM browser service with their acquisition of TestObject (real devices). This took a while to fully roll out as we were dependent on certain APIs that were originally only on TestObject, but they eventually got there.