Sauce Labs Reviews

We use it for automation testing of our e-commerce product. We also have some apps that use React Native and they deploy to mobile devices. We also do responsive mobile testing. That means we test anything that hits a website with a browser, or on a phone through React Native, through Sauce Labs.

We also use their VMs and their video recordings.

We use the automation testing and the ability to run it against many device configurations. It's very convenient.

Infrastructure provisioning is a big thing. The whole point of having this expensive license for Sauce Labs is so that we don't have to maintain multiple versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. We don't have to maintain our own device farms or our own servers, and that means no security patching, compliance, or auditing. A whole bunch of infrastructure headaches are offloaded to Sauce Labs.

Using it every day, and having all the manual QAs get some experience working with it, has saved us multiple person-hours. Just having an automated testing solution, Sauce notwithstanding, means an army doesn't have to sit there and click, click, click, multiple times, every time we do a release, to test the same old things and make sure the same old features still work. Having Sauce Labs on our side, we can actually do all of that at scale with the automation.

The number of testing environments is definitely mission-critical because it plays a part in a release. We run these automations so that we are able to catch issues and so that a customer does not experience issues. And not having to do manual QA frees people up to do exploratory testing. It frees them up to use their intuition and domain knowledge to find bugs that have come in from new features and that might affect old features. It's absolutely essential that we have Sauce Labs. There's no way we could accomplish releases at our current rapid cadence without it.

We also run tests in parallel. It would take way too long to do it one by one. It saves us tens, hundreds, even thousands of hours. And Sauce Labs has reports on that, telling you if you're maximizing your concurrency and whether your licensing is affected by concurrency units, which is great. Knowing that we can run tests in parallel means we can focus on the tests themselves and the quality of the tests. We don't want to create duplicate tests because that would increase test maintenance. Running them in parallel means that we're getting the most for our CPU buck.

We send over a configuration object in JSON and it's very convenient to be able to do it that way.

Also, Sauce Labs is optimized for automation and integration with the major CI/CD platforms and developer tools. We have an integration with App Center that we're working on. They have a storage API that lets us retrieve APK and IPA, iOS and Android builds, install them on the phone, so that we can continue testing. They integrate well with Jenkins.

It's super-important that the solution is optimized for integrating with these major CI/CD platforms and tools because at the manager level, they want integrations out-of-the-box. They want to reduce internal tooling or internal custom stuff.

We use the browser/OS combinations, mobile emulators, and real mobile devices. It's huge having multiple types of testing available in a single platform. It's definitely a competitive differentiator. For example, Microsoft has its own test automation through App Center and there's also BrowserStack and other competitors. It's very important to be able to tell the decision-maker, "Hey, Sauce Labs already has it, so don't worry about it."

They also have a huge number of browser OS combinations, mobile emulators, and real mobile devices. The solution covers a ton of combinations, probably almost any combination you would encounter when a custom reports a bug. That is great for QA to be able to reproduce that issue on that exact same device. 

Sauce Labs maintains physical devices in their data center. They go out and buy the device and provision it for you when you have a real-device contract and licensing, and that's also huge. You're on a physical device.

And for the mobile emulation, which is great as well, they not only have Apple devices, but different iOS versions, which is a huge feature, including different Safari versions on different macOS versions and different Windows versions. More often, you only have a subset of what Sauce Labs offers because people will be mostly using cutting-edge stuff or people might be using mostly legacy. But Sauce Labs runs the gamut and they have all kinds of devices. You'll run out of combinations that are relevant to you before you run every single combination that Sauce Labs has.

I'm pretty happy with the areas of the product that I've been using. The Appium part, even though Appium feels pretty new, is still supported. They support Selenium 4 as well as several other test frameworks, such as Cypress, XCUITest, Puppeteer, and Espresso. Sauce Labs also has artificial intelligence, the AutonomIQ test framework. With AutonomIQ you can have manual QA where you submit an Excel file and then it just automatically creates a test. That's a killer feature.

They offer so many things that we haven't even tried yet, like performance testing and courtesy Docker containers. They are continually updating the documentation. They have performance testing and visual testing. They even acquired Backtrace, which is some sort of error monitoring solution.

I've been using the Sauce Labs solution for about a year and a half. Our company has been using it since 2016.

We haven't had any issues. Sauce Labs has been more reliable than we have.

Scalability is connected to the pricing. The solution is scalable if you have the money to scale. It's based on what they call concurrency units, and they can get expensive.

We have about a dozen users of the solution. They are mostly involved in test automation, SDET.

Support is great, including the support ticketing. Every time I've had a support ticket, they have replied. If they need to, they escalate it. They'll answer technical questions about things like IP whitelisting, and they'll take a look at the screenshots we provide or links to tests that are failing. Their support is empowered to really probe and ask questions.

We haven't used their expertise to help integrate automated testing into our CI/CD pipeline. We have generally solved every issue that we've encountered so far, but they do offer software architecture assistance. It's good to have someone at the software level, and not just sales or product support. If I say I'm having a development issue, it's good to be able to talk at that level, using the jargon.

When I came in, the solution was already set up. Tweaking it has been easy.

One of the great things about it is that there's no maintenance. We just throw a JSON content object over and then they take over from there.

I can't speak about metrics, but we're able to run automation tests in parallel and that helps with releases. It's definitely a critical part of the whole process. And even moving forward to cloud, it's definitely a big part.

They could improve on the pricing because it seems pretty expensive. I'm sure it's justified, but it's expensive.

For some of the features we aren't using yet, I believe we do need to add new licenses, but for others, we just need to try them out. We just need to have the bandwidth and time.

We use other products for front-end testing but there's no significant reason we couldn't do it with Sauce Labs. It's not lacking in that solution. We use other tools mostly due to dev team mindset. They prefer something more local to their use and something they're familiar with. If we were to push the QA side to do performance testing through Sauce Labs, they'd be open to it. 

It's not only Sauce Labs, as a vendor, that offers automation, but there's BrowserStack and others that also offer it. But using Sauce Labs has been great.

Definitely try it out. They are very friendly about giving you trials and then following up with monthly syncs. They'll connect you with a sales rep, an engineering-type salesperson, and you can have monthly chats with them. They'll keep you updated about their product updates. It's free to try it. Once you try it, I think you'll see the benefits.

Latency due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution hasn't been a concern at all. It runs automatically and sometimes it runs during off-hours, so any latency is not a big deal for us. For flaky tests we use Ruby, which has a rescue retry pattern that we use a lot and that's really helped. Test flakiness is just a reality of test automation and we have good workarounds for it. So cloud latency in Sauce Labs hasn't been an issue.

We've been pretty happy with Sauce Labs. I'd probably have to think pretty hard about what it is lacking. It's been working for us and whatever we throw at it, including Appium, mobile device simulation testing, and being able to support multiple apps. The automation testing has been great. The SC (Sauce Connect) Proxy is pretty friendly. There are the VMs and the video recording. Overall, we've been pretty happy with it. I'd be hard-pressed to find a glaring issue that hasn't been addressed.

They are our preferred vendor for all our mobile and browsing test needs.

We have been using it for mobile applications and multi browser testing and multi-device testing.

I use the mobile application. Whenever we get mobile builds through the CI/CD pipeline, we directly upload them to Sauce Labs. We usually test on various devices and versions. The solution helps us to identify any issues that we might face in different environments, devices, and versions.

We can run our tests in parallel. We have access to all the browsers and devices, where we can run our test haphazardly. They have video recordings as well for the tests that we run, which can easily be accessible and shared across different teams or management without them being actually logged in. 

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.

The real concern is the load time of applications or real devices when we start our tests. It takes some time to load the application or web browser. Sometimes, it is frustrating too. Since they are real devices, we understand it takes some time to load. However, if it were to improve, then that would be a great asset to the solution. So, we would like better responsive times when opening applications and running tests.

We have been using Sauce Labs for more than two years.

It is stable. We haven't explored all their platforms yet, but as far as we are concerned, we have seen stability.

It is definitely scalable.

Mostly, our team consists of 15 people who run tests automation and test manually. We have other teams as well who have access to Sauce Labs, and they test certain applications in Sauce Labs. We guide them on how to use it. So, there are around 25 to 30 people who probably use it quite often.

We use it to do at least 10 test automation runs every day. We do have plans to increase our usage in the future.

I worked with their customer support for these devices. For the issues that we were facing, they were very responsive. 

Other than the automation part and CI/CD process, one of our colleagues works with them. I mostly work on the manual efforts of Sauce Labs and our applications while one of our teammates works with the automation support.

I would rate them as nine (out of 10). I would even give them 10 at times. They were very responsive and quick. When we were facing some issues, they usually responded quickly.

Positive

Before joining my company, I used to do tests manually.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was able to quickly adapt to using Sauce Labs after joining the company.

Running tests in parallel on Sauce Labs definitely saves time and effort. Less time is consumed and we can have various results on our various versions or devices. This ultimately impacts our business by identifying the real threat and real defects, then moving forward accordingly. 

Usually, our test runs for about 40 minutes with various levels of testing. Sauce Labs reduces that time in half.

We have seen ROI. With some improvements, we will be much happier with our ROI.

The pricing is reasonable due to the amount of diversity that they provide. However, I feel they might be more flexible to bargain based on their relationship with our organization.

They can increase the range of real devices for testing while reducing the cost. When it comes to purchasing real devices, even if we have a certain number of devices available, it would be great if we could add additional real devices for a reduced cost. 

I would like to give the admin the ability to upgrade operating systems based on the client's needs rather than having them update the OS versions every time. Maybe they could create a page for admins where all devices or browsers can be purchased or viewed, so we could then have an idea of what kinds of devices could be purchased.

I would rate the solution as eight or nine out of 10 based on the diversity that they provide.

We use the Sauce Labs test automation VMs to help our quality assurance engineers run automated tests concurrently, using a platform that we build in-house.

We use the browser VMs and we definitely use it for end-to-end testing. We may use it for performance testing, as well.

The way that we use it is pretty straightforward.

This product is a big time-saver, so by extension, it's a cost-savings.

It's helped us remove the need for extensive manual testing, which is how it's freed up a lot of time for quality assurance engineers to work on other things. They can work on the automation itself, for example, whereas otherwise, they'd be spending all of that time doing these tests manually and synchronously.

Sauce Labs is optimized for automation and intention with major CI/CD platforms and developer tools. In our case, we've plugged it into our pipelines quite easily. It's an integral tool in that regard, so it is very important to us that it is optimized for integration.

We run Sauce Labs with almost every code commit.

Although Sauce Labs is a cloud-based solution, latency has not been a concern for us. We haven't run into any situations where latency is causing any major issues.

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.

I am pretty satisfied with the options in terms of the number of browser and OS combinations they support, as well as the number of real devices, mobile emulators, and simulators. I haven't had any needs that they couldn't satisfy. This enables us to ensure the quality of our products, cross-platform.

A really nice feature would be a pay-as-you-use model, as opposed to a strict number of VMs that you pay for continuously.

I have been working with Sauce Labs for two years and nine months. It has been used by the company since before that.

This product is not super scalable, because you have a very specific number of VMs that you can use. If there was a pay-as-you-use-it model, I think that would really increase the scalability of the solution, but right now Sauce Labs is a bottleneck because you have a specified number of VMs.

We use, on average, 75 of their VMs per hour. Optimally, we're using as much of the VMs as we pay for. As such, the goal is to have our tests running often enough to maximize that usage.

I can't speak to how widespread this product is used in the company, although in my team, there are 10 of us using it. My team is serving between 30 and 40 quality assurance engineers. Other teams in the company are also using it.

I have not personally used Sauce Labs' technical expertise to assist us with integration or for implementing solutions, although, in the past few years, I've submitted a couple of trouble tickets based on some technical difficulties.

I found the technical support to be great and timely. I haven't had any complaints, and the issues have been resolved.

I don't have any experience with other similar technologies.

I was not with the company when it was first implemented.

We pay for a specific number of VMs. The licensing model should be changed to pay-as-you-use, which would make it more effective.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Sauce Labs is that concurrency and automation save a lot more time than you initially think.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Sauce Labs in our CI/CD pipeline for our mobile app.

I work on the team that develops the mobile application for Discover, and we run about a couple of thousand tests per day on Sauce Labs devices. Whenever our developers are contributing code to our application, we'll run a bunch of tests on Sauce Labs devices, and every night we run a full suite of 1,000-plus tests on those Sauce Labs devices.

It saves us a lot of time because Sauce Labs provides us with plenty of devices, enabling us to run 1,000-plus tests in parallel. As a result, we can get it done pretty quickly. Typically, testing would take six days, and we got it down to one day. That's how much we're saving.

Also, because Sauce Labs provides tons of different devices, instead of relying on a small number of devices on-premises, we can rely on Sauce Labs' cloud and run tests on all sorts of devices. That can include things like an old Galaxy S7 or a newer Galaxy S20, as well as different operating system versions. Sauce Labs has all of that and we can test all sorts of different combinations of devices and operating systems.

The most valuable part of Sauce Labs is its virtual devices, simulators and emulators. They can spin up hundreds of them as soon as we want them.

Something that needs improvement is the speed. Relatively speaking, it's slow, but that's because we are communicating with the Sauce Labs cloud service and, obviously, there are network delays. We're hoping that in the future it can just be a bit quicker.

Another aspect that could be improved is having the virtual devices boot up a little quicker. Sometimes we wait up to a minute before a device is available. It would be nice if that was 30 seconds or so.

I have been using Sauce Labs for about a year.

The availability of Sauce Labs is really good. There have only been two occasions that I recall it being down, and that was specifically for their Apple devices. Other than that, there has been almost 100 percent uptime.

We have no complaints about its scalability. We're able to scale to 100-plus devices, and I'm sure Sauce could provision 200 or 300 in the future. I don't see any issue.

At this point, we have about 40 people working with the solution, and they're primarily application engineers and quality assurance people.

Their support has been great. When I submit a new help ticket or a request, they usually respond on the same day, by the end of the day, or the next day. Sometimes tickets do linger a bit and they take some time to become resolved, but most of the time our issues do get addressed and resolved within the week, which is nice.

Positive

We used a service called SeeTest for a couple of years. We switched to Sauce Labs because it seems to be more up-to-date with the technology. They upgrade more often, which is something we wanted in a cloud service. In addition, we use a special testing tool called Appium, and Sauce Labs is actually an active contributor to that open-source program. We thought using Appium and Sauce Labs would be a good pairing of wine and cheese.

The initial setup of Sauce Labs was really straightforward. We only required credentials, and one or two other bits of data, and then we were able to connect and run our tests on their devices. There wasn't too much setup or configuration.

Our company has absolutely seen return on our investment in Sauce Labs. Whereas before, we were relying on physical devices we had at our headquarters, or we relied on SeeTest, which has limited devices, 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. That gives us more confidence that our Discover application works on old devices as well as new, obscure devices. And that is true for our quality assurance as well. My QA colleagues are able to test on way more devices than they were before we had Sauce Labs.

I'm not involved on the financial side too much. I forget the exact numbers, but being in the industry, Sauce Labs' price seemed high. I don't remember what our SeeTest contract cost, so it's really hard to compare.

When we switched over to Sauce Labs, we didn't really look too deeply at other cloud service providers. There were two or three others, but we never engaged with them or talked to them because we saw pretty early on that they weren't exactly right for us. We saw that Sauce Labs fit the bill.

The main differences between Sauce Labs and the others were the number of devices available to us and the user interface. Sauce Labs has a really nice interface. And the overall impression we got from Sauce Labs was that they're very up to date and that they keep up to date all the time. They don't fall behind. They always have new features coming out.

Don't expect tests to be quick. That's something that's not only applicable to Sauce Labs but to all cloud service providers. The testing is going to be a pretty slow process. That advice is specifically for developers who are developing solutions.

We have been using Sauce Labs to test various browsers and OS combinations as well as test our applications. Our existing automation scripts are written in various technologies, which could be Java, JavaScript, Selenium, Cypress, etc. Jenkins is the tool that we use to typically run our jobs. Through Jenkins, they get scheduled and run in Sauce Labs. This is where we choose to run them, through various browsers and OS combinations.

We use Sauce Labs core and whatever services that we choose to go with, like browsers and mobiles. From there, we can choose the browser and OS versions, etc.

Without Sauce Labs, we wouldn't be able to test as quickly or simultaneously on various browsers. That is the capability Sauce Labs has brought to us.

The automated functional testing, visual regression testing are pretty important to us, as those are the use cases for which we use Sauce Labs. Specifically because it is hosted in the cloud, we don't have to use as much capacity from our own servers. We don't have to maintain and install various versions of browsers nor do we have to maintain them. It is a good solution and works well for us.

Most of our teams who have solutions to test on mobiles are using the solution's mobile emulators and simulators. Having that availability is very important for a complete testing experience.

We use the solution's emulators, simulators, and different browser version combinations for all our testing. For every release, we validate across various browsers. If it is a mobile application, then we need to validate across various Android and iOS devices as well as the previous few versions of each of the operating systems.

The customer base that we typically serve is vast, diverse, and varied. This makes it very common to have our applications used across various applications, systems, and screen sizes. To test across all that, we needed a system in place. That is why we are using Sauce Labs. Without it, we would either develop something in-house or rely on possibly testing in only one particular system. For example, with Android, our entire customer base who is not Android wouldn't be able to validate and reproduce the user experience.

When we are doing releases, the releases happen across all teams and various services. This means all of them need to test for a particular release deployment in whatever environment simultaneously. Based on the number of concurrent VMs that Sauce Labs provides, we can add or reduce VMs as needed. The amount of concurrency that we have purchased is specifically to support our various teams to do deployments simultaneously. Doing these simultaneous tests has reduced our test execution time.

There are a lot of analytics that you can do and look at when you run your jobs. It also gives you how much throttling has been seen across various teams over the past month. It tells you which particular line of code has been failing for however many runs that you have done. 

The concurrent usage and VM availability are its strengths. We have found concurrent throttling very useful. So, we know exactly which job or team is using more than their capacity and might need additional capacity.

We have also found the code analysis that gets run on Sauce Labs very useful. It tells us the line of code that has been failing or not received a new command.

Sauce Labs is optimized for automation and integration with the major CI/CD platforms and developer tools. Most of our teams are creating CI/CD pipelines. Some of our teams do many deployments in a day. Without CI/CD, that pace is not possible. Having that capability, for whichever automation tool that we go with, is critically important for us.

Some of the trends that it shows. It only allows you to view the last month. Having it go beyond a month, e.g., yearly trends, would be good. While the yearly trends are available, they are available to Sauce Labs administrators, who are internal to Sauce Labs. I don't know if they are available for customers yet.

My teams use it. I have about eight or nine teams and most of them have been using it at least for a year. Since I joined the company a year ago, I have been watching it being used.

The stability is good. I haven't seen any issues with it. We haven't experienced any latency or downtime issues.

It has been pretty scalable. We are looking at increasing some of its concurrency capacity.

We are currently using about 40 to 50 current VMS.

One part-time resource is primarily needed to design the user groups where jobs will be run. Initially, we had all of our jobs run under a single user name, but then we decided to segregate that and divide it up amongst the teams. So, one part-time resource is needed just to analyze and manage how your jobs get run, then analyze the trends after that.

The technical support has been pretty good. We haven't seen a lot of technical issues in which to engage their technical resources. Occasionally, we used them when we couldn't see something, didn't have an admin account, or for account creation. All those things got resolved very quickly, maybe in a day or so. I would say the technical support is good and rate it as 10 out of 10.

Positive

It was implemented before I joined the company.

It was already set up when I joined the company.

From an infrastructure support perspective, the number of VMs, browsers installations and versions that we would be maintaining without Sauce Labs would be a lot. This includes not only the infrastructure costs, but also the maintenance costs and people's time. The labor cost associated with maintaining all of that would be considerably high. In terms of efficiency, having concurrent VMs with various browser combinations available has allowed us to run multiple executions by all our teams.

Typically, in a night, eight or nine teams have 40 to 50 jobs running simultaneously, which is amazing. Otherwise, if that was not concurrent, then it would have to be maintained in our own infrastructure. That would be a lot of money.

Sauce Labs has room for improvement with its price point. Using a real mobile device, and having that dedicated to your team, costs more than actually purchasing a mobile device. We haven't tried the real devices yet. This is because of their price point.

The number of concurrent VMs that Sauce Labs provides depends on your purchase license level.

Latency has not been a concern due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution. This comes back to the number of VMs and licenses that you have purchased. For example, if I have a capacity of 70 VMs, but I am running 100 jobs, then 30 of them will be throttled and we will see the latency. However, if I were to up my licensing, then I wouldn't see that latency. That is why it just depends on the license tier that you have ordered.

I have not compared it with other solutions.

Plan for how you want to use it and how many teams will be using it as well as the types of accounts that it makes sense to have, different access levels, and who should have it on their team. If you plan ahead, then you don't have to fix it afterwards.

We haven't tried the front-end performance testing.

I would rate it as eight out of 10.

We use it for a lot of end-to-end UI test automation.

We really just use the visual test automation, not the performance, for our product teams.

There are a couple of products using this solution, so it has been nice having a visual result. We can step through the tests, if necessary, and showcasing to the business that we are doing automation has been very helpful.

I like the dashboard and seeing the test results. As a manager, I like to see the insights of the people using it, understanding the total path and run. I can see all of that as a manager. I also know team members love seeing the dashboard and seeing the test results in real-time.

Sauce Labs is optimized for automation and integration with the major CI/CD platforms and developer tools. That is just what they do. It is an easy, one-click solution versus having to manually run scripts.

The platform is easy to use. I can quickly navigate it.

Sauce Labs provide access to automated functional testing and visual regression testing from a single platform. It is very important to have one tool that can do this versus having multiple. Just integrating Sauce Labs within the application and seeing the pass-fail results right away is extremely helpful for teams. You don't have to go to some place else to find them.

Everything is so intuitive.

I can't remove team members that have left the organization. I can only set them as inactive. It would be really nice to clean up my data and delete them from the team management.

I have been using it for several years.

I haven't heard anything about stability. It has been pretty fantastic.

Latency has never been a concern with Sauce Labs. Being in the cloud is super fast for any application, and we take advantage of Sauce Labs being in the cloud. If there was any latency, then it would be on the coding of Selenium versus the Sauce Labs application.

We have about 60 products and only three or four are using it. We have started getting other team members' products to use and integrate Sauce Labs in their test automation, though I am 100% sure of what every single product is doing.

The support is fantastic. We have monthly meetings with Sauce Labs. Even if I have questions, I can just reach out to them. If I have any questions, then all I have to do is reach out to them for help, and they are very responsive. If I have any questions on training, they are willing to set up training calls and train the team on Sauce Labs.

The feedback is super fast. They are always there when I need help. I have never had an issue with their technical support.

I would rate their technical support as 10 out of 10. They are constantly reaching out to see if we have any problems or need anything, but we are perfectly integrated with the Sauce Labs application and don't have any issues.

If Sauce Labs doesn't suggest training, make sure that you ask for it, if needed. They are always willing to come out or even do virtual training. Whatever they can do to help with the process, they are always there. So, if you don't hear about the training, make sure you ask.

Positive

We did not use a different testing tool before Sauce Labs.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They make it so easy to be able to integrate Sauce Labs with Selenium. There were no issues at all, and if we ever had issues, the technical support would just help right away.

We partnered with Sauce Labs. They came to our office for a few days and gave a demo to a large group of people on how to use Sauce Labs, but also provided a little training on Selenium.

I liked the training. As a manager, some people hesitate using test automation because they just don't know how to start. By having some hands-on training with Sauce Labs team members, we were able to give that technical training to people so they understood, "Oh, I could do this. I can start this."

They saw how easy it was to integrate Sauce Labs within Selenium code. The training just helps make it possible because I can't make people do things, when it comes to test automation. By being able to train hands-on and seeing the results, that made it possible for us to do test automation.

We have definitely seen ROI. We are utilizing Sauce Labs specifically for one of our product teams with several more being integrated with Sauce Labs. Seeing the benefit from even one team continuously using it, we are happy with the results that they are getting and having them sharing that knowledge. That is really how we will get other products on it, when people see that it is working for teams who are getting positive results. 

I am not in charge of the licensing costs. They come and ask me, "Do we still need this?" Then, I tell the teams why we need XYZ and the licenses.

We did initially go with Sauce Labs because of the pricing and integration.

I didn't make the decision on Sauce Labs. It was recommended by some other team members that did the research. People were looking at, "Can it help us from a visual point of view? Can it add tests, see all the tests through portals in the cloud, and make testing go quickly?" It offered the possibility of being able to run on multiple browsers and operating systems as well as had integration with Selenium.

I have no complaints nor issues with Sauce Labs at the moment. It meets all of our expectations.

Teams are continually using the product. I would hear complaints if there were any issues. I am trying to get teams to spread the word to other teams. So, the teams are very happy with it and trying to get other people to use Sauce Labs as well, then integrate that into their product team.

Because our applications are not mobile, there are only certain browsers that we need to support. So, we are really not taking advantage of the number of browser/OS combinations, mobile emulators and simulators, and real mobile devices that it offers. I am just trying to get team members up and running with test automation and having some tools to be able to help them with that. I know that they are very competitive with other products in this regard, but that has not been an important factor for us.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10. I love the capabilities of it, the support, and the service. 

We have two kinds of applications using Sauce Labs in our company. One is the website, and we're using it to test across browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and mobile, to see that all the components we have in a web page work. 

The second product we use the solution for is our driver application. We make and deliver pizza. Every time an order is received, we dispatch a driver to bring it to the customer. We have an application for driver dispatch on iOS and Android, and we run test cases for those as well.

I cannot imagine our company without Sauce Labs. We are using it a lot. It gives us a provider in the cloud for running test cases, scenarios, and validation, and that is really important nowadays. You could always run testing locally or have your own environment, but it's difficult to scale and difficult to maintain. You need to dedicate a lot of resources to do that.

We ran, for example, 500 test cases in the last week for one specific team, and those test cases were running at 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM, for some specific scenarios. We could not do that without Sauce Labs. We are integrated for continuous integration using Jenkins and we're triggering all these tests nightly for different teams on different schedules. It would definitely not be possible to run that manually or in a different way. The cloud is the right environment to run it in, and for that, Sauce Labs is the best option in the market.

Also, the Failure Analysis helps us prioritize remediation. If we have a very high number of test cases failing for a given feature, we can analyze them, see the root cause, see the code in our repository, and create a Jira ticket to address those failures. That feature is very helpful for us. It's pretty straightforward and doesn't consume too much time. I generally spend about 15 minutes analyzing all the failures across the teams to see which three test cases are failing most.

Another benefit is that Sauce Labs saves us on manpower. We have manual testers, but it's not possible for them to cover all the different scenarios and all the different features before release. That means we need to rely on the automated test cases, and to do that, we need to run those test cases on a cloud platform. Sauce Labs saves us a lot of time doing those validations. It probably saves us from having to hire hundreds of people. Every team within our organization has one or two manual testers, but for every team we have hundreds of automated test cases that we run before release. It's good enough, for our operations, to have one or two manual testers. We are seeing good results with that, but to run hundreds of different scenarios I don't know how many people we would have to hire.

From my perspective, as an automation architect, the most helpful feature is the test history. I can easily go to the dashboard and see how many test cases we ran and how many failures and errors there were. I can segregate things by team and by specification. And I can tell a teammate, "You need to fix this test case, it is failing too much. The percentage of failure is too high." 

The most important historical data is for the last seven days. I don't go too much beyond that period of time because my feedback is about how we did in the previous week. In our environment, everything is changing all the time. We are testing different products and running different test cases. So for me, it's the recent data that is key.

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. I can see a test case that is failing and on which particular platform or device it is failing. And the most important part is identifying the problem with the code. We can always go to the line of code and see the possible solution. The Failure Analysis helps us to discover which test cases we need to work on.

Before the test history became the most important feature, the most important part was the configuration that made it easy to connect test cases to the cloud. As a result, we can easily test different devices at once. 

And from a manual test perspective, testing in different browsers using the live test solution in Sauce Labs is very helpful.

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 great if Sauce Labs didn't provide any geolocation by default, and we could provide the geolocation that we want. 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.

That is the only "ask" that I have for a feature, a geolocation that we can set by configuration. That would be awesome.

I have been using Sauce Labs since I started with this company, back in 2018, so that would be about three years and six months.

I am an automation architect and my work includes providing cloud testing to different teams. Sauce Labs is one important piece for us.

It's pretty stable. We don't have any problems with the solution. We probably need more virtual machines internally, but that's not related to the performance or availability of Sauce Labs. When it comes to stability, everything is going great.

The scalability is connected to our budget. The virtual machine concurrencies that we have are not great for our demand. I am talking with management about increasing the budget for 10 or 20 more virtual machines. But Sauce Labs itself provides the opportunity to scale very easily. For us, it's just a matter of budget.

Sauce Labs has a pretty reasonable price and is worth it for the solution and what we are doing with it.

There are a lot of other options on the market and I have tried some of them in the past. But Sauce Labs has a lot of advantages. For example, one feature that I really love is that when we are doing troubleshooting or have a problem with test cases, they answer every single question so quickly and are very helpful. The customer experience using Sauce Labs is great in terms of support. That is an aspect other companies don't really have.

I started with our company as an automation engineer and their support was able to help me with every single configuration, every single problem, and every single question. I cannot remember a single time that they were unable to help me. They are the best.

The usage of Sauce Labs was not as great, when I first started using it, as it is now. We have a great approach to testing using Sauce Labs. We test mobile and we do live testing and we are running automated testing. We're integrated with CI. Nowadays, it's better than three years ago and I look for it to improve even more in the next year.

At our company, Applause, we offer software testing as a service and we always get a lot of interesting, uncommon or challenging use cases from our clients. We sometimes get ones that require specific devices or browsers to work. For example, we have clients who want to mix testing on desktop browsers and apps or test on multiple apps to achieve some kind of scenario; perhaps you are at a restaurant, and you are ordering something on your personal phone/tablet, which shows up on the restaurant's tablet or desktop browser. 

Our clients are not only looking for executing the test cases manually, but their target is to automate all of them and be able to integrate that into their CI/CD pipeline and get faster feedback about the stability of the changes that the development team produces on a daily basis.

Sauce Labs covers all of our automation needs and also allow us to do manual testing in case we are verifying bugs or testing something else.

My main focus is on automation testing and Sauce Labs is an integral part in our success as a company as they offer 1000+ different combinations of desktop browsers, real devices & OS versions. This allows us to pretty much cover all the automation test scenarios we need. We've also integrated them in our internal SDKs and are using their platform on a daily-basis to test the quality of our clients' apps and websites.

The number of the real devices they offer is also very important to our business, because most clients want to support multiple devices & OS versions. We have clients who want us to run automation tests on Android 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and sometimes even on Beta versions. Sauce Labs offers all of that, enabling us to support all of these versions, which is really nice. The same goes for their desktop browsers, although most of our clients usually use either the latest version or the one before that. I haven't seen a client who wants to use and old browser version like Firefox 50, but it's a great feature that Sauce Labs offers, in case it is needed for any reason.

In terms of delivering software faster by getting feedback with every commit, it depends on the client and the system under test (SUT); some of our clients are testing manually and that would take them days, others have a CI/CD pipeline and run some smoke tests after each commit. Part of our job at Applause is to enhance the overall testing process of our clients & automate it as much as possible. Instead of taking days to do a full regression, it might take a couple of hours to get the same results. 

Because we're working with Sauce Labs, and we're doing automation for our clients, they get a pretty fast cycle of feedback that allows them to make the right decisions at the right time.

Without Sauce Labs, it would be really hard to achieve the software quality standards or the automation coverage that our clients need.

Towards the beginning of this year, we had to constantly switch between Sauce Labs and their legacy solution for real device testing, TestObject. This was causing a lot of issues or confusion for our engineers & clients. Now, with the new unified platform, we get everything we need in one single place and it is so intuitive and straightforward. You can easily do manual testing, view running automation scripts or switch between data centers from one single place.

Overall, we're very happy with the combinations of browsers and devices they offer, especially because they always have multiple instances of the same device. If you want an iPhone 12 for your tests, you can get five of them for example and run your test scripts in parallel, which reduces the total execution time.

Sauce Labs also allows specifying the browser version as "latest", which means that they automatically pick the latest version they support and run the tests against it. Previously, we had to manually change the browser version in our scripts whenever a new one becomes available and it was wasting a lot of time (as it needed to be done for a lot of projects).

Their platform also offers some cool features if you're working with apps. You can just pass them a URL to an app build that is stored somewhere on your servers or on AWS, and they will install that on the phone/tablet and run tests against it on the spot. This has allowed for an easier integration with our SDK, as opposed to competitors who don't offer such feature.

The market is changing and we're seeing a lot of shift towards testing on OTT devices, like Apple TV, Fire TV Sticks, Chromecast and Roku. This is really an emerging market and has the potential to grow exponentially. We've been getting a lot of clients asking us to test on OTT devices, either manually or via automation. We have been able to automate testing on OTT devices, but it is done with local devices hosted on our premises, so we can't scale that fast or cover all of the huge demand we are seeing. We're looking for the ability to do this in the cloud, so if Sauce Labs offered such a feature, that would be really great. Working on OTT devices usually includes testing on desktop browsers or phones/tablets and having all of those supported in one platform would be ideal.

While Sauce Labs pretty much covers everything we need, another exception is HarmonyOS. I know it's a new thing and it's not supported by a lot of providers, but it is something that clients have started asking for. That is something we'd be really interested in seeing, for both manual and automated testing.

Also, latency, due to Sauce Labs being a cloud-based solution, has been a concern. We work in different continents and countries, but last time I checked, Sauce Labs was only offering two data centers, one in the EU and another in the US. If you're not in either of those two places, you would have latency and issues running your test scripts. However, I'm working with clients in different countries and we've seen some latency issues, depending on the country, although it's not huge. In comparison to other providers who have data centers in different places, there is some noticeable latency.

I've been using Sauce Labs for over five years.

Sauce Labs is pretty stable in comparison to other providers. We still get some issues every now and then or random failures, especially when there is a new OS or browser version, but it's not a big deal and we can easily contact Sauce Labs' support to get things fixed.

One of Sauce Labs' competitors does not force you to select the data center you want to run against. They just figure out which data center is closest to where you are executing your test scripts from. They offer a single, unified endpoint or URLs when it comes to automation and handle everything else internally. When we're writing automation scripts, we don't need to specify, "I want to run on the European data center," or "I want to run on the American data center." We can just say, "I want to run a test case," and depending on the location you come from, the platform is smart enough to direct it to the nearest data center to reduce latency.

This may not be directly related to scalability, but this kind of capability would make it easier for us to build our SDKs faster and focus on other features, which in return would allow us to scale faster as a company. The learning curve for newcomers would also be easier, because they wouldn't need to worry about figuring out which data center to run against.

While I love the fact that we can specify the data center ourselves, because it gives us more freedom, I would love to see more data centers in different places around the world, to reduce latency, and the selection of the data center implicitly done by the platform, so we don't need to worry about it.

We open support tickets, and they're pretty responsive, they get back to us on time. They're really good about fixing things and making their platform more stable.

I've run into a couple of situations where tickets have been left for weeks without feedback, but that has not happened often. When it does happen, I can go to our customer success manager and say, "We need some attention to these tickets." She can take care of it and that makes the support pretty good.

Positive

Pay attention to selecting the correct data center, otherwise you would run into some latency-related issues.

Although we are not using visual regression testing, that is something that would be really interesting, because a lot of our media clients want to test visual validations on their apps. If Sauce Labs is offering that out-of-the-box, it would be really interesting for us.