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Appium vs SmartBear TestComplete comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
Ranking in Regression Testing Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (9th)
SmartBear TestComplete
Ranking in Regression Testing Tools
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Functional Testing Tools (8th), Test Automation Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Regression Testing Tools category, the mindshare of Appium is 2.4%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 11.0%, up from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Regression Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SmartBear TestComplete11.0%
Appium2.4%
Other86.6%
Regression Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Independent consultant, at OpenText
Efficient mobile testing with intuitive emulation capabilities and a user-friendly interface
Initial setup for Appium (especially for iOS) is not beginner-friendly.Consumes too much of your host machine's resources, potentially slowing down the machine.Appium Inspector often lacks deep insight or crashes with certain app builds. Improve test flakiness by intelligently selecting robust self-healing locators,simplified installers, better documentation, GUI-based config management,smart wait mechanisms and better failure logs.
Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Test Lead at Emerson
Used for integration automation, user-based automation, and web automation
The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts. The solution has introduced a new feature that helps us identify objects we cannot normally identify. It gives you a fair idea of objects, resolving the object recognition issue. The solution can be used to perform different tests on different machines.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"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."
"What I like about Appium right now is that it's like Cypress in the sense that............. to test the components in the way I want them to be tested."
"The solution helps with test automation. We focus mostly on Java."
"The solution is stable."
"We do not need to pay for the solution. It’s free."
"The most valuable feature of Appium is it supports iOS and AOS and is open-source."
"I like the cross browser compatibility. It saves a lot of time re-writing scripts to accommodate different browsers."
"The solution helps improve the stability of our product. It also decreases the work of our manual quality assurance engineers."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is regression testing tools."
"The most valuable feature of SmartBear TestComplete for me is the image comparison functionality; it quickly detects any changes in the UI."
"It is a strong automation tool for desktop, browser, and API testing."
"When compared to other tools, it is very simple."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"Runs in different remote machines. We have multiple versions of the software being tested."
 

Cons

"The user interface needs improvement because there are issues when setting up environment variables."
"It breaks down."
"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."
"Configuration-wise, there is a lot of room for improvement."
"We haven't been able to fully leverage Appium for multiple reasons. I think number one is just that the tests take a long time to run. We have had some issues around just the results themselves and how predictable they are, but those are not issues with Appium directly."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually."
"Support-wise, it could be better."
"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."
"Error handling features in the tool are a little limited."
"This solution could be improved by making it easier to visualize where there is a failure without having to look at it in detail."
"The initial setup of SmartBear TestComplete was complex."
"There could be API interfaces with this tool."
"In SmartBear TestComplete the integration with Jenkins could be easier. Additionally, some of the controls could have better customization options. For example, if a grid is used and it contains multiple controls within it, it can be a checkbox, radio button, or any kind of control, the way the Object Spy is operating currently there is a lot of room for improvement."
"Product is not stable enough and it crashes often."
"At times, identifying or locating an element can be somewhat challenging. However, in a recent test update, they introduced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability. This introduction has reduced the challenges to some extent, as we can now utilize OCR if the normal method doesn't work. Nevertheless, there is still significant potential for improvement in TestComplete's ability to identify various object elements. I don't have any specific concerns to mention. I have observed significant improvements in TestComplete over the past few years, especially in its support for highly dynamic object elements used in products like Salesforce Dynamics 365. In earlier versions, there were numerous challenges, but the current version is far superior to its predecessors."
"Right now, the product only supports Windows."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as I know, Appium is a free solution. It's not for commercial use."
"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 free."
"Appium is open source; we can use it for free."
"The solution is open source."
"I'm unsure if there's any cost associated with Appium. I got the free package which includes the server GUI application and the inspector application, and it was free to download, and that's all I need to get my work done. I'm not aware of any additional costs associated with the tool."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"The solution is open-source."
"The pricing is a little above average — it could be lower."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable."
"The solution is around $1500. Some are perpetual licenses, and some get a yearly report card."
"My advice so far, is that while it’s not quite as powerful and easy to use as UFT, its price tag more than makes up for it."
"SmartBear TestComplete is an expensive tool."
"The price is less, compared to other products, such as QTP."
"The product is becoming more and more expensive."
"The solution's licensing cost has increased because it has moved to some new SLM-based licenses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise32
 

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 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 needs improvement with Appium?
The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement. Additionally, the wait time functionality could be enhanced as I experienced failures with longer wait times.
What do you like most about SmartBear TestComplete?
TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SmartBear TestComplete?
I am not involved in pricing or licensing; our management team handles these aspects.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
While using SmartBear TestComplete, we are fine with the current capabilities, however, it would be beneficial to improve some performance aspects, especially the image comparison feature. Occasion...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Appium vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.