Sauce Labs vs Selenium HQ comparison

Sauce Labs is a functional testing tool that ensures your apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, OS, and device. The solution allows you to automate functional testing on multiple operating systems and browsers, emulating the way that a user would use the website. With Sauce Labs, you can also run tests on various operating system and browser combinations in parallel, reducing the amount of time to get results. The Sauce Labs solution provides enterprise-grade security, scalability, and reliability.

Sauce Labs Features

Sauce Labs has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Automated cross-browser testing
• Mobile testing
• Secure tunneling protocol
• Usage reporting
• Enterprise security
• Provisioning
• Centralized user account management
• Access controls
• Support for Selenium, Appium, and JUnit Testing

Sauce Labs Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Sauce Labs. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Speed up development time: The solution makes it possible for you to test web and mobile apps in parallel and accelerate your testing time by up to 10x or more. Using Sauce Labs, you can increase developer productivity because your teams will be able to spend less time with test maintenance and debug faster.

• No worrying about infrastructure: With Sauce Labs, you don’t have to buy or maintain more servers or mobile devices. You also don’t need to worry about updating browsers or VM licenses. Sauce Labs allows you to easily scale your tests with parallelization to speed up test cycles and boost capacity on their reliable cloud.

• Run tests securely: The solution enables you to securely run your scripts and access your data and files from behind your firewall. Sauce Labs generates single-use VMs for every test and destroys them immediately afterwards so your data always remains secure.

• Easy integration for your CI systems: Sauce Labs automated testing platform integrates with Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft VSTS, and others so you can test as fast as you develop. In addition, you can share results instantly by using the solution’s simple plugins.

Reviews from Real Users

Sauce Labs is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It has valuable features that include error logging, helpful dashboards, and its browser.

Joel A., Product Manager - Data & APIs at a marketing services firm, says, "The error logging is very robust. If we run a test through Sauce Labs and there's some sort of issue, a log will appear on the screen. Log messages are usually heinous and horrible... Sauce Labs is incredibly good at saying things like, 'Hey, here is the exact issue. Fix this and you can run the test.' That helps in getting things up and running and executing the way they should."

Savio D., Sr. IT Architect at a healthcare company, mentions, "Sauce Labs' dashboards contain multiple useful metrics in one place. Everything is represented to us visually on the dashboard, which helps us understand where to focus our attention, what the issues are, and what we need to resolve."

PeerSpot reviewer, Rob L., Director of Quality Assurance - Shared Service at a financial services firm, writes, “The most valuable feature for us is the browser. The most critical thing is that this software aligns with our Agile and DevOps way of doing things. It integrates with kickoff scripts through DevOps.”

Selenium HQ is an umbrella project that includes a number of tools and frameworks that allow for web browser automation. In particular, Selenium offers a framework for the W3C WebDriver specification, a platform- and language-neutral coding interface that works with all of the main web browsers.

Selenium is a toolset for automating web browsers that uses the best methods available to remotely control browser instances and simulate a user's interaction with the browser. It enables users to mimic typical end-user actions, such as typing text into forms, choosing options from drop-down menus, checking boxes, and clicking links in documents. Additionally, it offers a wide range of other controls, including mouse movement, arbitrary JavaScript execution, and much more.

Although Selenium HQ is generally used for front-end website testing, it is also a browser user agent library. The interfaces are universal in their use, which enables composition with other libraries to serve your purpose.

The source code for Selenium is accessible under the Apache 2.0 license. The project is made possible by volunteers who have kindly committed hundreds of hours to the development and maintenance of the code.

Selenium HQ Tools

These three main Selenium HQ tools have powerful capabilities:

• WebDriver: If you are just starting out with desktop or mobile website test automation, you will be using WebDriver APIs. WebDriver controls the browser and executes tests using the automation APIs that browser vendors provide. This gives the impression that a real person is using the browser. Because WebDriver's API does not need to be compiled alongside application code, it is not intrusive. As a result, you can test the same application that you push live.
  
  
• IDE: Develop your Selenium test cases using an IDE (integrated development environment). The most effective way to create test cases is to utilize this simple Chrome and Firefox extension. IDE uses Selenium commands that are already in use to record user activity in the browser with parameters set by the context of the element. This is an excellent approach to learning Selenium script syntax and will save you time.
  
  
• Grid: You can run test cases on several machines and operating systems with Selenium Grid. The local end controls how the test cases are triggered, and the remote end automatically runs the test cases after they are triggered.

Reviews from Real Users

Selenium HQ stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its driver interface and its speed. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Avijit B., an automation tester at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “The driver interface is really useful. When we implement the Selenium driver interface, we can easily navigate through all of the pages and sections of an app, including performing things like clicking, putting through SendKeys, scrolling down, tagging, and all the other actions we need to test for in an application.”

Another PeerSpot reviewer, a software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “Selenium is the fastest tool compared to other competitors. It can run on any language, like Java, Python, C++, and .NET. So we can test any application on Selenium, whether it's mobile or desktop."