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Appium vs Sauce Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (7th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
Sauce Labs
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (13th), Test Automation Tools (19th)
 

Featured Reviews

Luis Gerardo Meneses Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for direct interaction with an application's DOM but complex configuration
What I like about Appium right now is that it's like Cypress in the sense that I can get to the new DOM of the application and select the components and create the functions to test the components in the way I want them to be tested. That's why I like it right now.
AnupKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good stability and robust but lacks generative AI capabilities
Technical support is equally very important. If you talk about anything deployed to production, and the project is live, customers are using that, and they might face some issues, some functional issues. That's when support people play a role in identifying the fix or the incident. Based on that, we create an incident based on the customer defect or whatever. Once the incident gets raised, the support will play a role in working on that particular incident. If it's a code-based incident, administration, or integration issue, support people play a big role in resolving those issues before reaching the exact developers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of Appium are the in-built functionality, which we can use in our code. For example, move back, move front, navigate one page before, and navigate one page ahead. You can do this by using the in-built functions from Appium."
"The interface is user-friendly, which is beneficial for users, even for those who are new to it."
"We develop apps using the React Native framework, and Appium integrates well for testing those apps. The Appium automation framework also has good integration with GitHub Actions and plenty of other tools and frameworks, including BrowserStack."
"The library is extensive so the driver interacts with most functions or actions on mobile devices."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The best feature of Appium is that it allows you to inspect the element. With the Appium Inspector, you don't have to install another application to do the inspection. I also like that Appium has Android device connectivity. Currently, most people use Appium as automation software, and I haven't found any other tool that's more powerful than Appium."
"The solution is stable."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"Sauce Connect gave us ability to test an application that was hosted locally."
"So far, the stability has proven to be quite good."
"They update for the latest browsers and mobile phones and support a lot of combinations. They have 1,000-plus desktop combinations and browser versions, which is really great. We need that at Applause. The all-in-one testing suite aspect of it is really important because most of our clients prefer to go to one place."
"The most valuable feature is the cross-browser feature, it has many android and iOS devices both simulators and real devices. It's easy to integrate. I also like video recording too."
"Maintaining many environments for test is a bear. These guys make it so easy with their CI integration that you can have tests going in after a few hours."
"With Sauce Labs, we have a whole universe of devices: Galaxy, all the iPhones, and all the operating system versions. All our software developers are able to test on a multitude of different devices."
"Easy to integrate with the other platform for tracking purposes."
"It runs on the cloud, so you don't have physical setups to run all of this."
 

Cons

"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"An application developed on the Unity platform, such as a gaming application, objects are moving in that case. Interacting with those elements is still lacking in Appium. Appium doesn't have the internal library to play with the Unity platform. That is a huge lack right now."
"Appium can improve when the case fails, there should be a feature where you can generate the report from Appium. Once you're on a test case, automatically the screenshot should be captured which would avoid manual intervention. These features would be beneficial to migrate to Appium."
"Image recognition could be improved. We have some images in our mobile applications. It should be able to run from the cloud, so we can automate the catcher."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"Support-wise, it could be better."
"The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments."
"Configuring the project to be used in Appium is a little bit tedious."
"Speeds up the time it takes to run end-to-end user interface (UI) tests inside their virtual machines (VMs)."
"When we were in development, it was a bit of a pain because we have onshore and offshore development. One of our development shops is in India, and we were running tests over there. When some of the users tried to log in, it was slow for them or we didn't have enough licenses. That was during the core development before we even launched."
"Multi-domain SSO is a big concern for us right now, especially as we've been merged into a larger company. I suddenly have teams coming from 20 different domains, and because the main master Sauce Labs account is locked down to one SSO domain, there are teams that can't run a test right now. I've heard they're working on a solution and they've been very communicative with us about it. A solution to that would help us a lot."
"The ability to install profiles on iOS real mobile devices should be included."
"We have had some issues with the Sauce Connect Proxy on our Jenkins servers failing to start, which makes the optimal CI/CD pipeline come to a halt."
"The only drawback is the speed, it will be good if we have a server in Asia too. It will be great if we can improve speed while initialization and execution."
"It should provide more examples of script code."
"Lacks the ability to start multiple tests simultaneously."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no license for this solution because it is open-source."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"The solution is free."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"We found out that we could explore features of the solution for 30 days trial. We can switch to a permanent license later if we want."
"The solution is open-source."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"We have an enterprise account; it has worked great for our needs."
"Compared with other services, Sauce Labs is a bit expensive."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
"​Now that we have an enterprise license, we no longer have to worry about minutes each month!​"
"Their pricing is incredibly competitive."
"With respect to pricing, they did a bundled discount because we went with Sauce Labs for both mobile and browser. They were very competitive on pricing and provided a bundle discount for us as a larger customer."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"The pricing is definitely on the higher end, and there are other options that are more cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend Appium?
I do recommend Appium. It is an open-source solution and completely free of charge. We use Appium and Appium Studio as our base for any type of mobile automation for testing. It has a great interfa...
What do you like most about Appium?
Appium helps me to do as much as much as I want to.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appium?
My experience with Appium from a pricing perspective is favorable due to it being open source, making it a cost-effective option.
What do you like most about Sauce Labs?
It has significantly enhanced our testing accuracy by approximately 50%.
What needs improvement with Sauce Labs?
Sauce Labs can include new technologies like generative AI, which can reduce the human effort in writing test cases. For example, in my current project, we reduced the time it took to complete user...
What is your primary use case for Sauce Labs?
I work as an automation engineer using Selenium WebDriver with Java, and API automation using Rest Assured with Java. I have also worked with Docker integration on AWS. Additionally, I have experie...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. Sauce Labs and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.