5 Sauce Labs Alternatives to Consider in 2023

Sauce Labs has emerged as a prominent player in the software testing domain, thanks to its comprehensive testing solutions that include cross-browser testing, mobile application testing, and live debugging sessions. However, while Sauce Labs offers a robust and flexible platform, there might be situations where an alternative solution more closely aligns with a team's unique needs, such as diverse viewpoints, capabilities, or financial constraints.

In this post, we will delve into 5 Sauce Labs alternatives that have proven effective in 2023, carefully evaluating their features, benefits, and how they compare.

Sauce Labs' Testing Capabilities

Sauce Labs specializes in automated testing of both desktop and mobile applications, providing a comprehensive range of testing solutions, and ensuring compatibility as well as performance. They accomplish this in part with some key features:

• The Sauce Test Toolchain: A unified platform that streamlines testing from development to post-release, offering insights to detect and correct errors swiftly.
• Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Testing: Guarantees optimal functionality across various browser and OS combinations.
• Mobile App Testing: Ensures a uniform mobile app experience across different devices, browsers, and operating systems.
• Sauce Insights: Provides real-time visibility to prioritize and address high-impact issues.
• Automation Frameworks: Supports frameworks including Appium, Cypress, Espresso, Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, TestCafe, and XCUITest.

Standout Features and Unique Selling Points

The platform's ability to record screenshots and videos of ongoing tests, along with detailed logs, enhances the transparency of the testing process. Its cloud-based device testing and automation capabilities allow users to conduct tests on a wide array of operating systems, browsers, and devices, ensuring compatibility and performance across varied environments.

The platform's support for multiple browsers and versions, coupled with a commitment to include support for new browsers upon release, ensures that users can assess their applications on the latest platforms. Additionally, Sauce Labs' scalability, enterprise-level security, comprehensive reporting, and machine learning-driven analytics solution form a robust and versatile testing platform.

Challenges and Areas for Improvement

Despite these strengths, Sauce Labs has faced challenges in certain areas. Some users have reported intermittent outages, disrupting the testing process and causing delays. These outages may be attributed to various factors, such as server issues or maintenance, and addressing them would enhance user satisfaction.

The platform's inconsistency in scaling virtual machines horizontally has also raised concerns. Some users have found this aspect to be costly and less efficient, suggesting a need for more cost-effective scaling solutions. A detailed analysis of Sauce Labs' pricing structure reveals that while it offers a variety of plans to suit different needs, some users may find the cost of specific features or scaling options to be high compared to other testing platforms.

Sauce Labs Features & Pricing

Sauce Labs offers various pricing models and plans tailored to different needs:

Feature	Free	Monthly (Starter Plan)	Annual	Enterprise
Thousands of mobile devices, emulators/simulators, and browser/OS combinations	✓	✓	✓	✓
Unlimited users	✓	✓	✓	✓
Auto-refill credits		✓	✓	✓
Private device cloud				✓
Sauce Connect proxy local tunneling				✓
Single sign-on (SSO)				✓
Team management				✓
Premium support options				✓
Enterprise-grade security				✓
Price	$0	$50 per month (+ taxes and fees)	$600 per year (+ taxes and fees)	Custom Pricing
Credits	2,000 free credits per week	25,000 credits/month	330,000 credits/year (30,000 bonus)	Unlimited automated testing minutes
Concurrency	Run tests on up to 10 devices in parallel	Run tests on up to 25 devices in parallel	Run tests on up to 50 devices in parallel	Custom

Why Choose Automation for Cross-Browser Testing

Different browsers interpret HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in unique ways, and cross-browser testing helps you detect and mitigate these inconsistencies, delivering a consistent user experience.

While manual testing involves human testers working across multiple browsers, automated cross-browser testing employs tools to execute test scenarios on several browsers simultaneously. Here's why automation is often favored:

• Time-Saving: Automated testing performs repetitive tests rapidly, allowing developers to focus on other tasks.
• Better Test Coverage: Automation guarantees extensive coverage across browser-OS combinations, leaving no compatibility issues unresolved.
• Improved Accuracy: Automation reduces human error, facilitating the detection and correction of bugs.
• User Experience and Compatibility: Ensures a uniform user experience and identifies browser-specific errors.

Cross-browser testing necessitates the selection of features to test based on compatibility benchmarks, scenarios, timelines, and budget. Here's an overview of typical features:

• Consistency: Validates both intended and unintended visual changes.
• Base Functionality: Confirms basic functionality across most browser-OS combinations.
• Design: Verifies that the website's appearance aligns with specifications.
• Accessibility: Assesses compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
• Responsiveness: Checks adaptability to different screen sizes and orientations.

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By adopting automation for cross-browser testing, organizations can provide a uniform user experience across various browsers and devices. Thoughtful feature selection ensures that testing is customized to meet the specific needs of the target audience.

Meticulous: An Integrated Visual Testing Solution for Developers

Meticulous presents a streamlined integration into your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline with minimal setup, allowing you to record user sessions through a simple JavaScript snippet. The platform provides specific instructions for various frameworks like NextJS, and validates new changes via Pull Requests.

Automating UI Testing with Zero Flakes

Meticulous takes great pride in its close-to-zero flake rate, pinpointing UI bugs by replaying user traffic, thereby removing the need for traditional UI test writing—both scripted and no-code testing. Also, by replaying real-world traffic you can catch bugs that other traditional UI tests may miss. The automatic updates of baseline images and visual regression detection expedite the review process. The isolation of frontend code guarantees no side effects, negating the necessity for a staging environment in most cases.

Maintenance and Reliability

Meticulous' zero-maintenance approach has gotten great feedback from engineers and CTOs alike. As Joel Hollingsmith, an Engineer at Patchwork, puts it, "Once you start using Meticulous, you won’t want to stop. It provides confidence without the labor of writing and maintaining tests." Seth Carney, CTO of Courier, underscores how Meticulous has "eliminated the need to write and maintain frontend tests across my engineering organization." These endorsements mirror the trust and assurance that Meticulous has instilled in its users, detecting innumerable UI bugs and regressions without authoring a single test.

Pricing Models and Plans: Flexibility for All Users

Meticulous offers a free starter plan that allows testing of 20 pull requests per month, catering to individual developers and small teams. For larger customers, custom pricing is available, providing flexibility to suit various needs and budgets. Additionally, Meticulous is free with unlimited pull requests for any open-source project.

LambdaTest: Cross Browser Testing Made Easy

LambdaTest's exhaustive cross-browser testing capabilities, encompassing both manual and automated methodologies on a cloud-based infrastructure, distinguish it from numerous competitors. Its support for real mobile device testing and geolocation testing, coupled with its plethora of integration options with various tools and frameworks, renders it a multifaceted choice.

Whether you are an individual developer seeking core testing capabilities, a QA team pursuing collaboration and efficiency, or an enterprise necessitating advanced features and security, LambdaTest offers a way to satisfy your precise requirements.

Real Mobile Device Testing: LambdaTest's Pinnacle of Precision

This distinctive feature, prominently showcased on LambdaTest's homepage, allows developers and QA testers to gain insights that go beyond just visual appearance, probing deeper into the details of functionality, responsiveness, and performance across diverse devices, operating systems, and network conditions.

Real mobile device testing in LambdaTest supports:

• Natural Gestures and Interactions: Emulating authentic user behavior, including swipes, pinches, and taps.
• Network Throttling: Simulating varying network speeds to comprehend how an application behaves under disparate connectivity conditions.
• Detailed Device and App/Crash Logs: Supplying comprehensive information to diagnose and rectify issues.
• GPS-Based Geolocation Testing: Permitting testing from divergent geographical locations.
• Camera Image Injection: Simulating camera input for applications necessitating access to a device's camera.
• Biometrics Authentication Support: Testing security attributes reliant on fingerprint or facial recognition.

Analysis of Plans for Different Personas

• Free Plan: Ideal for individual developers or small teams exploring basic testing capabilities without any cost.
• Live Plan: Suitable for QA teams and developers requiring extensive testing across various browsers and devices. The automation testing feature augments efficiency.
• Real Device Plan: Aimed at enterprises with a more substantial budget for QA, this plan offers real mobile device testing, ensuring precise results. It's comprehensive and includes features like network throttling and geolocation testing.
• Enterprise Plan: Customized for large organizations, this plan provides advanced features like premium support, IP whitelisting, and enterprise-grade security. It's crafted to meet the intricate testing needs of large-scale projects.

For a complete overview of the different features being offered, please refer to the table below:

Features/Plans	Free Plan	Live Plan	Real Device Plan	Enterprise Plan
Price	$0	$15/month	$25/month	Custom
Parallel Tests	1	1-25	1-25	25+
Live Real Time Testing	✓	✓	✓	✓
200+ Desktop Browsers	✓	✓	✓	✓
Screenshot Tests per month	10	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Responsive Test per month	10	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Native App Testing on Emulators/Simulators	3	✓	✓	✓
Real Mobile Devices			✓	✓
Geolocation Testing		✓	✓	✓
Web and Mobile Debugging Tools		✓	✓	✓
Integrate with JIRA, Asana, Slack		✓	✓	✓
App Uploads			✓	✓
Network Throttling			✓	✓
GPS Based Geolocation Testing			✓	✓
Smart UI Inspector			✓	✓
Camera Image Injection			✓	✓
Biometrics Authentication Support			✓	✓
Multiple Locale Support			✓	✓
Premium Support Options				✓
Advanced Access Controls				✓
Single Sign-On				✓
IP Whitelisting				✓
Advanced Data Retention Rules				✓
Dedicated Device Cloud				✓
Advanced Local Testing				✓
Usage Analytics				✓
Early Access to Beta Features				✓
Unlimited Users				✓
Enterprise-Grade Security				✓
Apple Pay Testing				✓
AI-Powered Test Intelligence/Test Analytics				✓

TestComplete: A Comprehensive Testing Platform

TestComplete goes beyond the traditional testing tool paradigm; it’s a comprehensive platform that integrates into your entire software development lifecycle. From the inception of test creation to execution and subsequent analysis, TestComplete furnishes an extensive array of features that cater to diverse stages of testing.

Test Creation: A Versatile Approach

TestComplete’s automated UI testing capabilities encompass desktop, web, and mobile applications, ensuring exhaustive coverage. With both scriptless “Record and Replay” capabilities as well as scripted testing, TestComplete is tailored to testers across the spectrum of skill levels. Integration with tools like Selenium and Appium amplifies the creation of functional tests.

Keyword-driven testing ensures that every team member, irrespective of programming knowledge, can contribute to test automation. Concurrently, data-driven testing permits users to execute automated UI tests with varied sets of input data, augmenting test coverage and simplifying maintenance.

Test Execution: Robust and Scalable

TestComplete's execution features are meticulously designed to be both robust and scalable. Parallel testing facilitates execution across multiple physical and virtual machines, while integration with Azure DevOps and Jenkins assures dependable building, testing, and deployment of software.

Cross-platform testing guarantees that UI tests can be automated for desktop, web, and mobile applications. The tool's AI-driven engine identifies dynamic UI elements, ensuring that tests remain resilient even when the UI undergoes changes. Integration with BitBar supports testing on diverse platforms and browser configurations, further enhancing the tool's adaptability.

Test Management & Analysis: Streamlined and Efficient

Managing and analyzing tests with TestComplete is an effortless endeavor. Users can obtain real-time information on the progress and status of their tests from a unified interface. Integration with prevalent defect tracking tools like Jira and Bugzilla refines the defect management process, facilitating tracking and resolution of issues.

Continuous testing for DevOps is endorsed through seamless integration into the DevOps ecosystem, while automated test reuse across disparate projects and environments broadens test coverage and conserves time. Integration with Git and Atlassian Bitbucket for version control amplifies the reusability of tests, rendering TestComplete an invaluable asset in any testing environment.

TestComplete Pricing: Tailored to Your Needs

TestComplete offers pricing plans for diverse needs and budgets:

• TestComplete Base: Commencing at $3,046, this plan offers unparalleled object recognition, scriptless Record and Replay, automated reporting, and more.
• TestComplete Pro: Priced at $4,739, this sought-after plan encompasses all the features of the Base plan, plus desktop, mobile, and web testing, and access to the parallel testing engine, TestExecute.

Add-ons like **TestExecute** and Intelligent Quality furnish additional features, such as unlimited testing across parallel devices and AI-powered object recognition.

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TestComplete distinguishes itself with its comprehensive automated UI testing capabilities across desktop, web, and mobile platforms. Its extensive range of integrations ensures it integrates seamlessly into most development ecosystems, rendering it a versatile tool for testers of all skill levels. Whether you are seeking to create, execute, manage, or analyze tests, TestComplete offers a robust and scalable solution meticulously tailored to your needs.

Perfecto: A Cloud-Based Mobile Testing Lab

In the dynamic and rapidly evolving domain of software development, Perfecto manifests as a solution for high-velocity web and mobile testing. Leveraging cloud-based solutions, Perfecto ensures that teams can operate with agility and efficiency, adapting seamlessly to the multifaceted landscape of contemporary technology.

The appeal of Perfecto starts with its Mobile Device Cloud, furnishing a streamlined cloud-based solution for testing on authentic mobile devices.

Advanced Testing Capabilities

Delving deeper into Perfecto's offerings, one discovers features that resonate with the demands of contemporary testing teams. Test Failure Analysis & Reporting not only accelerates issue detection through automated scanning supported by machine learning, but also empowers teams to correct them with precision with their large knowledge base. The Real User Simulation and Remote Access & Debugging features foster a lifelike environment for more accurate testing, bridging the gap between development and tangible user experience.

Pricing and Customization

Perfecto's pricing plans are carefully crafted to suit a broad range of testing requirements:

• Live: Ideal for manual testing, starting at $83/month.
• Automate: A blend of automated and manual testing, beginning at $125/month.
• Scriptless: A no-code solution tailored for those who value simplicity.
• Enterprise: A comprehensive package for businesses requiring dedicated devices and enhanced features.

Each plan reflects Perfecto's commitment to providing value across all levels.

Professional Services & Support

Beyond its robust testing platform, Perfecto extends its proficiency through a professional services team. From Quick Start Onboarding to Automation Acceleration, these services are designed to hasten time-to-value, boost productivity, and ensure success from the outset. Whether you are new to testing or looking to refine your existing processes, Perfecto's consulting services serve as an invaluable ally in your pursuit of excellence.

Browserstack: Real-World Device Testing

Designed to provide flawless app and browser testing experiences, BrowserStack's emphasis on genuine devices and browsers ensures accurate results, eliminating dependence on unreliable emulators and simulators.

Getting started with BrowserStack involves exploring manual cross-browser testing through its "LIVE" feature, allowing users to examine websites across various browsers, guaranteeing compatibility and functionality. For those more interested in automation, the "AUTOMATE" feature conducts automated tests across a multitude of browsers.

Augmenting Visual Quality, Mobile App Testing, and Integrations & Collaboration

With its "PERCY" feature, Browserstack offers visual testing and review, meticulously inspecting every pixel to confirm that the aesthetics align with the planned design.

The complexity of the mobile domain requires a sophisticated approach, and BrowserStack rises to the challenge with "APP LIVE" and "APP AUTOMATE." The former facilitates manual testing on real devices, while the latter introduces automation to physical devices. This complementary strategy guarantees that mobile applications undergo testing under genuine conditions, mirroring true user experiences.

BrowserStack's capabilities extend beyond individual features; it serves as a hub that integrates seamlessly with renowned tools and platforms ensuring not only a smooth blend with existing workflows but also fosters collaboration and efficiency across teams.

Selenium Integration

BrowserStack's integration with Selenium allows for automated browser testing. It does not generate Selenium tests for you, but it does provide a platform where you can run your Selenium tests on multiple browsers and operating systems. This ensures that your web application works consistently across different environments.

Jenkins Integration

For those utilizing Jenkins for continuous integration, BrowserStack offers a plugin that enables you to run your automated tests as part of your build process. This ensures that any code changes are immediately tested, reducing the time to detect and fix issues.

Slack Integration

BrowserStack can send real-time notifications to Slack channels, keeping the team updated about test statuses. This fosters quick communication and immediate action in case of test failures or other issues.

Appium Integration

For mobile application testing, BrowserStack integrates with Appium to offer automated native and hybrid mobile app testing. Similar to Selenium, you would write your Appium tests and then run them on BrowserStack's real device cloud.

Additional Tools and Platforms

BrowserStack also offers integration with other tools like JIRA for bug tracking, GitHub for code repository, and many more, making it a versatile choice for modern DevOps environments.

In summary, BrowserStack's integrations do not automatically generate tests for you but provide a robust platform where your tests can be executed across a diverse range of environments. These integrations are designed to enhance workflow, encourage collaboration, and elevate the quality of the end product.

Pricing Pathways

BrowserStack outlines a range of pricing plans, carefully tailored to various needs and stages of the testing journey:

• Live: Aimed at manual testing, starting at $29/month.
• Automate Pro: Created for automated browser testing, beginning at $129/month.
• Automate Mobile: Focused on mobile automation, starting at $199/month.
• App Live: Designed for manual mobile testing, starting at $29/month.
• App Automate: For mobile app automation, starting at $199/month.
• Percy: For visual testing, beginning at $29/month.

Enterprise and custom pricing options are also available, reflecting a flexible approach to accommodate diverse budgets and requirements.

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It should be noted that while many customers are happy with Browserstack’s product overall, it’s a common concern to experience lag at times when spinning up a new device, and experiencing high latency once the device is up and running.

Choosing the Right Testing Tool

The selection of a testing tool is not a transient decision but a long-term commitment. It must align with the project's long-term vision, enabling growth and scaling as needed. Choosing a tool that fits perfectly today but fails tomorrow is a shortsighted decision. The ability to look beyond immediate needs and align the tool with future growth is a hallmark of strategic planning.

The right tool is more than just software; it is a strategic partner. It aligns with the vision, evolves with the project, and adapts to the constantly changing landscape of business requirements. This decision requires insight, foresight, and a thorough understanding of the project's direction.

Meticulous

Meticulous is a tool for software engineers to catch visual regressions in web applications without writing or maintaining UI tests.

Inject the Meticulous snippet onto production or staging and dev environments. This snippet records user sessions by collecting clickstream and network data. When you post a pull request, Meticulous selects a subset of recorded sessions which are relevant and simulates these against the frontend of your application. Meticulous takes screenshots at key points and detects any visual differences. It posts those diffs in a comment for you to inspect in a few seconds. Meticulous automatically updates the baseline images after you merge your PR. This eliminates the setup and maintenance burden of UI testing.

Meticulous isolates the frontend code by mocking out all network calls, using the previously recorded network responses. This means Meticulous never causes side effects and you don’t need a staging environment.

Learn more here.

Authored by Kasper Siig