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Perfecto vs SmartBear TestComplete comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

Perfecto
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
15th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
23rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Performance Testing Tools (16th), Mobile App Testing Tools (4th)
SmartBear TestComplete
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
7th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Regression Testing Tools (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Test Automation Tools category, the mindshare of Perfecto is 2.4%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 6.0%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Test Automation Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Roland Castelino - PeerSpot reviewer
Its reporting allows us to have a clear view regarding what tests have been executed
The most valuable would be their Live Stream analysis, where I can see the live analysis of all the executions on a single device or multiple devices as well as track them. The live analysis and reporting would be the single most valuable feature. We leverage Perfecto’s reporting and analytics a lot. From the CI Dashboard, it is mainly the status, which is the past, failure count, and time consumption, e.g., how much time did an average test or script take? Along with that, it provides the historical view compared to the previous result, e.g., am I a pass or fail? Also, the stack trace is very important. Whenever a pass occurs, we don't look beyond that. However, whenever a failure occurs, the stack trace information that it gives us is pretty critical for us when figuring out where failures lie. It gives a summary for the pass/fail count, total test count, the historical view, time consumption for each test as well as the total tests, and the stack rate of the failure. Perfecto's analytics are very important since we use them on a daily basis. We run our executions daily. After every execution, we pull information from the Perfecto reporting system and share that with our stakeholders. Having this information accurately reported is pretty important for us, so everybody is aware of the current status of the product. That way, we can evaluate the health of the product or environment against that which has been executed. Therefore, it helps make those real-time decisions and highlights the impact to the business. I found Perfecto to be pretty easy to use while executing against cross-platforms. The main reason is because the same script or test automation where we execute on multiple platforms has minimal changes that I need to do. Also, it is easy for me to set up an execution on one platform, then on another platform, either in parallel or one after the other. Parallel opportunities save me time. Once the execution has been completed across these different configurations, I can always check and compare, e.g., what are the differences and consistencies? We utilize Perfecto’s cloud-based lab to test across devices, browsers, and OSs. I use it occasionally for manual testing. Though, there are other team members who use it more frequently than I do. I use it mainly for executing my automated tests. We have the Perfecto lab, cloud devices, and machines. I can program my test to execute against any of those devices, which gives me more confidence in my product. I can compare and see how my product or application functionally behaves across these different devices and from a UI point of view, which helps me a lot. The device lab is extremely important to our testing operations. We rely on having multiple devices up and running all the time. Whenever we kick off an execution, there are multiple reasons why executions may get triggered: * CodeCommit * A scheduled job. * Might be on-demand by any stakeholder. We need the lab to be available, as we need devices up and running for executions to take place. Also, the devices help since they allow us to have parallel execution, and not just wait for a sequential device to become free and available. Therefore, volume is definitely key. It also gives us an opportunity to compare execution across platforms in that space. It is extremely important to you that the lab provides same-day access to new devices since we analyze that data every single day after execution. Perfecto provides their own framework called Quantum Framework. That is one option. The other option is, if I want to have my own framework, I can have a Java-based Maven project, take a Selenium library, AppiumLibrary, and REST Assured library, and utilize the open-source framework. It is easy for us to connect to Perfecto, no matter what framework we use, as long as it has these core libraries in it. I can design and structure it any way that I want. The execution will happen in Perfecto no matter what since they have support for these tools or libraries. It is pretty neat that way. We are not dependent on using just one particular framework to use Perfecto. While there are still some framework limitations, there is the opportunity to use multiple, different open-source frameworks, then pass the execution to Perfecto. We can use most frameworks, then design and craft it any way that we want, then just pass the execution to Perfecto.
Prakhar Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"I also like the reporting functions. We are constantly downloading these reports and sharing them with our final customers. They help us understand what kind of bugs are happening through the applications. The recording feature is handy because it lets us see a video of the process we run through the pipeline and discover the point at which the automation is breaking."
"The CI dashboard tool is very good, as is the Live Stream monitoring. Whenever I want to monitor execution, I can open multiple tabs in Perfecto and it is easy for me to refer to the CI dashboard and the Live Stream."
"The automated test reporting functionality is the most valuable feature. We use the CI Dashboard. It's very important as it is the main reporting tool for our automated tests."
"It creates a faster production cycle and is quick to market. Things get deployed earlier because the testing happens on time. We can do a lot of panelization, so a lot of test phases can happen in a panel. People don't have to wait for a device to come to them. They can access multiple devices at the same time and do testing at the same time."
"The number one feature, which if we didn't have out-of-the-box would be missed, is the fact that we have video execution. That gives us the ability to view errors or defects in the progression, from beginning to the end of the video."
"In terms of cross-platform testing, they offer all of it, every device available in the market. It covers real scenarios that mimic production so that we don't miss out on any devices that our clients might be using to run the applications we develop. It's been great and very helpful."
"It saves on the cost and effort of having to maintain our own virtual testing environment. Even our onshore team is not in the city that we work in, so that helps a lot. Even if we didn't invest a lot in getting multiple devices, having to share those devices would become a hassle."
"We are able to offer a quality product that has been tested fully, which improves our customer satisfaction. That is a good thing. It has also reduced our IT infrastructure cost. We don't have to spend a lot on setting up infrastructure, which becomes redundant or obsolete very soon. It helps in offsetting that cost."
"The product is stable for what we are currently using it for, and it is sufficient for us."
"TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good."
"The solution has a very nice interface."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is regression testing tools."
"It is very easy to maintain tests with this tool. It covers all necessary items in the test plan. The most painful item in testing is maintenance. When changes occur, the tests should be maintained."
"Selenium integration."
"The ability to run a whole suite of tests automatically (which we did overnight)."
"The most valuable features are the desktop and mobile modules."
 

Cons

"It would be ideal if there was a complete integration with other test management tools and other applications like HPLM, Micro Focus, or Microsoft Azure."
"The monitoring features, in particular network traffic monitoring, could be improved."
"Going by the dashboard or analytics capabilities that Perfecto or Perforce is looking to offer in its roadmap, it will certainly help if they also cater to executing and enabling decision-making, rather than just focusing on standard testing metrics such as execution, efficiency, and defect rate. These are good metrics, but they don't necessarily enable decision-making for SLTs. Any improvements in the dashboards and reporting tools should focus on metrics or SLAs that can help with decision-making."
"We have had some issues with performance, which is something that should be improved."
"The flakiness, or the accuracy, of the test execution can be improved. Also, the responsiveness of their cloud lab could be improved as well."
"When using devices on the cloud, it lags quite a bit at times. I know that these are real devices that are being projected on our laptop screens and monitors, but if the speed could be improved, that would be good."
"There could be some improvements done on the interface. At times, there has been a bit of a struggle when finding things on the interface. A UI revamp would be a better option in future. That UI hasn't changed much in a long time, so I think they could just make it a bit better so that people could find stuff easily and intuitively."
"If we could run an accessibility test in Perfecto against builds, it would help us a lot. Currently, that's a very manual process for us. We haven't found a tool that can do accessibility scans for iOS and doesn't depend on engineering effort. Having a feature related to that would be really awesome for us."
"The licensing costs are a little bit high and should be reduced."
"Product is not stable enough and it crashes often."
"SmartBear products generally have a weak link when it comes to integration with other test management tools like Inflectra."
"Occasionally, image comparison results in failures, possibly due to issues with resolution or font size on the server side, which can be challenging to identify."
"The way objects are added and used when utilizing descriptive programming could be improved. It is a little unwieldy, compared to UFT."
"The artificial intelligence needs to be improved."
"TestComplete gives support to do requests to a SOAP web service but has no support to do HTTP requests on Restful services."
"During the distribution of our regression test cases, the control IDs are not always recognized correctly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Perfecto is about 30-40% cheaper than Device Anywhere. That was a big reason why we switched. Perfecto also solves some of the issues that we had with Device Anywhere. We have grown by 100% since we started to use Perfecto, and now we have devices roaming. When we look at the competition, we would still stick with Perfecto."
"I am not sure about its pricing, but from our perspective, licensing has been easy. Anytime I have new users or requests for users that want to get added, it's a very simple process. I just give the architectural owner of the product the name and email address, and they're able to easily add a new user. We don't have any issues in regards to getting licenses, but I don't have any insights into pricing."
"Perfecto's price is excellent compared to other products with similar features. It was the lowest of the three we evaluated. We also established a partnership with Perfecto, so they provide discounts when we sell Perfecto projects and licenses to our customers."
"This is an expensive solution compared to others, by 30% to 40%."
"Perfecto has definitely saved us on the costs and efforts of having to maintain our own virtual test environment. We lost about 20 devices in the past to maintenance and audit. That was a massive loss for us, as a company, because we were giving devices to someone, but don't know whether we would get it back or not. Having those virtual labs, we don't need to worry about these kinds of things. We are easily saving $5,000 to $10,000 a month on device costing."
"Pricing-wise, it is fine. It is not as expensive as what we used to have in the past from HP, IBM, and others. It is decently priced."
"Although Perfecto is a good product for us to use, it is a bit expensive. It takes management a bit of work to find the appropriate funding for us to keep Perfecto. I imagine there could be some way to make it more accessible."
"It's definitely on the higher end of prices for this type of service."
"The option we chose was around $2,000 USD."
"The solution's pricing is too high."
"The product is becoming more and more expensive."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Buy modules on demand. If you have a four-person team and they will each automate tests only 25% of the time, it's better to buy a floating licence and share the tool during the work day."
"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
23%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
 

Also Known As

Perfecto Mobile, Perfecto Web
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Virgin Media, Paychex, Rabobank, R+V, Discover
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Perfecto vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.