Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Sauce Labs 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

Sauce Labs
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
12th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SmartBear TestComplete
Ranking in Functional Testing Tools
9th
Ranking in Test Automation Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Regression Testing Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Test Automation Tools category, the mindshare of Sauce Labs is 2.9%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear TestComplete is 5.9%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Test Automation Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Joel Alonzo - PeerSpot reviewer
Metrics about testing across the company are easily accessible, and it's easy to get teams up and running
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 other issue is that when you're behind a corporate proxy and inside a corporate network, it's a nightmare in general. And the problem that we've come up against over and over again is that a lot of our network staff don't want to open up giant CIDR blocks to internal traffic. Opening it up to one endpoint which is Sauce Labs, through a little API is perfectly fine. That's one IP address and it's no big deal. But for their virtual machines they have one jump box and that jump box contains an entire CIDR block that changes each time the tunnel starts up. In other words, if every call went into one IP and that got bounced back to a load balancer or net gateway, that would help a lot too. When I go to the network team and say, "Hey, we're using a product, a piece of software, and I need an entire CIDR block opened," the first and almost eternal response to that will be "absolutely not." Getting things set up and running is always going to be a bit of a struggle within any corporate environment. Most of that is not Sauce Labs' fault, but the things I just mentioned are things they could do to help deal with that struggle.
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

"Testing subscription videos for on-demand software, making them better quality and bug free for our customers."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to run concurrent automated tests up to a specified value, depending on what we are currently paying for."
"It helped to integrate our performance testing and UAT, which helped to deliver a bug free software for our customers."
"Before implementing Sauce Labs, we tested physical devices that team members had to share. It was more feasible when we were all located in one office, but we couldn't leverage our offshore capacity. With this solution, we can do everything remotely, which is essential now that most of us work from home."
"The Failure Analysis feature is really important for us, one of the most important aspects. What is the root cause? Is it because we have a defect or is it that we have a test case that we need to fix or modify? The Failure Analysis is one of the main functionalities that I am exploring all the time in Sauce Labs... The Failure Analysis helps us to discover which test cases we need to work on."
"It provides a comprehensive selection of browsers and platform versions for our test automations and CI/CD pipeline process. It also provides a comprehensive set of virtual mobile devices, which we can configure for our automation and availability. These features are valuable for us when it comes to testing our applications. We have a website and mobile applications that we want to test and diversify to various browsers and mobile devices as well as restore various versions. This helps us to find bugs that users might be facing and correct them."
"I have found the live test section with Sauce Labs to be extremely valuable. When you can't quite figure out why a test is failing, you can go to the live test results section within their tool and launch your test (specifying a given OS/browser, or device) manually and step through the test to see the issue more clearly, usually opening up the developer's tool console and watching the network calls and console (within Chrome) to usually find the underlying issue."
"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."
"The product has many features."
"TestComplete has strong reporting capabilities. The reports they generate are really good."
"I like the cross browser compatibility. It saves a lot of time re-writing scripts to accommodate different browsers."
"Customer service and technical support responsiveness are high. Everyone is very professional."
"The reporting is ready to use and doesn't require any setup."
"The solution's most valuable features are the drag-and-drop feature, keyword-driven approach, and reusability of the scripts."
"It's cross platform automation capabilities specially ranging across web, UNIX (via putty), and other systems."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure DevOps."
 

Cons

"The one issue I have is the 14-day trial that a new user gets for free. I understand the concept of the trial period; however, I think this could be revamped to a free 30-minute run time every few months or after a significant update once the trial period has ended."
"On a rare occasion, I will come into a ticket where a customer will have reached out to me after reaching out to Sauce Labs, saying, "Sauce Labs doesn't understand what I am going through. They are not being very helpful." So, I try to do clean up there. Outside of those extremely rare occasions, I have only had one or two of those support issues."
"Every time that we run scenarios where we need to discover the geolocation of our customers, by default it shows as Palo Alto, California. That's a problem for us and we need a workaround for those cases... It would be helpful if we could enter a latitude and longitude into Sauce Labs configuration and say, "When you run a virtual Chrome device or an iPhone, make this your default location. Then, provide me that device so I can run my scenarios," because we have stores in different regions across the United States."
"Running tests in the SauceCloud can take longer than running in a local environment."
"This product is not super scalable, because you have a very specific number of VMs that you can use."
"The Jenkins Sauce OnDemand plugin could have more options available to tap into more of the custom capabilities Sauce Labs actually supports."
"Progress towards reducing application testing time can be made."
"An image comparison would be a nice feature to include in the Sauce Labs product."
"The learning curve of the solution's user interface is a little high for new users."
"The solution needs more training manuals or some form of online forum for learning. It needs more documentation."
"The solution needs to extend the possibilities so that we can test on other operating systems, platforms and publications for Android as well as iOS."
"One notable drawback is the absence of native integration with Git."
"Right now, when you buy the solution, you need to pay for one solution. You receive one set up and you install it and it's just in that one machine. It would be ideal if they could offer one subscription where you can connect to different machines with a group subscription."
"We were testing handheld barcode scanners running WindowsCE with many menus of warehouse functions, and our biggest problem was the timing between input and responses."
"It is very hard to read the test log generated by TestComplete Executor if the log file is very big. TestComplete Executor is a small tool for just running the TestComplete test framework (not for developing)."
"This solution could be improved by making it easier to visualize where there is a failure without having to look at it in detail."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Trial the product and see if it suits your needs."
"Cost-wise, it's decent. If you have to get the base version out of it, it's the best solution to go with. As compared to other cloud service providers, the pricing of Sauce Labs is decent."
"Compared with other services, Sauce Labs is a bit expensive."
"It could be less like pay-per-use with a lower rate."
"It is an expensive tool."
"Try the free trial and work with a Sauce Labs representative to see what package works best for your application(s)."
"We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration."
"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."
"Our ROI is about $10,000 a year."
"SmartBear TestComplete is an expensive tool."
"It comes with a high cost."
"The option we chose was around $2,000 USD."
"TestComplete now have come up with three modules (Web, Desktop & Mobile), so based on the type of product for automation, it is adequate to purchase the required module."
"The solution's pricing is too high."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable."
"Overall, for us, the cost of the TestComplete platform and the three extra modules is around $8,000."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Test Automation Tools solutions are best for your needs.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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 don't know much about the pricing, however, I think it's cheaper.
What needs improvement with SmartBear TestComplete?
The recording function, when using Python, could be improved, as it does not work well in recording testing.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce.com, Mozilla, Zendesk, Puppet Labs, Twitter, Bank of America, Eventbrite, Bleacher Report, Okta, Intuit, Travelocity, Sharecare, CapitalOne.
Cisco, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, McAfee, EMC, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sauce Labs vs. SmartBear TestComplete and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.