6 Best Appium Alternatives (Free and Paid) for 2024

If you are looking for best alternatives to Appium, then this is the article for you.

The world of software testing is changing and so are the testing tools.

One of the most popular tools for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS mobile, Android mobile, and Windows desktop platforms that has been used for years is Appium, but we’re going to explore some best Appium alternatives in this blog post.

About Appium

Numerous mobile apps are being constantly developed to solve real-life problems. These apps must be tested before they can be commissioned.

This article will walk you through the Appium mobile automation tool and discuss its top alternatives. 

Appium is an open-source app testing tool with a simple yet powerful GUI and support for most Java Android platforms. The simplicity of the tool allows users to easily test and debug their apps on the go, from anywhere they have an Internet connection. Appium does not require any special equipment, making it perfect for people on the move. 

Appium’s underlying philosophy is that code should be reusable on different platforms. Appium was designed to test native apps without the need for an SDK or recompilation. Appium provides standard automation APIs that can be used on all platforms. It allows you to write tests using any of your favorite development tools, including Javascript, Javascript, C# Ruby, Python, and PHP. 

Appium had its beginnings in the year 2012 with Dan Cuellar at Zoosk. The first cross-platform testing framework was created in 2013. Appium 1.0 was launched in May 2014.

Features

• Automation testing in the Appium tool can be done on various platforms such as Windows, iOS, and Android. Other tools like Selendroid support testing on only Android.
• It is extremely easy to set up and works on the Selenium Web Driver API that specifies a client-server protocol called JSON Wire Protocol.
• It supports many programming languages, including Ruby, Javascript, C#, Python, and Java. It gives testers and developers some flexibility on the choice of language.

Pros

• It allows the test scripts to be executed simultaneously.
• Appium also contains a recording tool to record test cases and a playback tool for running such recorded tests.
• Various elements can be tested simultaneously (like emulators, real devices, and simulators).
• It is used for native app, hybrid app, and mobile web app testing. 
• Offers an excellent user interface application to assist in designing cases by previewing app screens and retrieving names of the elements you intend on interacting with

Cons

• There were some cases when Appium caused the application under test to crash.
• The setup process is difficult for new users.
• Element browser sometimes is unreliable and has sporadic fails.
• A skilled automation tester is necessary in order to build the quality code for automating mobile test cases.

Verdict

Appium is an automation tool that validates mobile browsers and applications. Because it’s free, this tool is used for mobile automation testing. It supports both iOS and Android platforms. 

Comparison Appium Competitors

List of Best Appium Alternatives And Competitors

The main details of each software are listed below, but if you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick list of the best alternatives to Appium Tool.

If you’d like to see our in-depth analysis, keep reading.

#1. Kobiton 

Best for functional and performance testing on real devices, cloud, and on-premises environment. 

Kobiton is a high-speed, real-time web testing software that provides the most accurate and convenient web testing experience to developers and testers. With the help of this software, testers can easily debug and test mobile devices with the combination of multi-browser and browser testing along with cross-platform testing with web browsers. 

Don’t miss: Kobiton Mobile Testing Platform Review

• Kobiton platform allows both manual and automated testing conditions in the application. This helps in reducing the overall testing time and allows multiple independent tests to run simultaneously. 
• It helps you identify cross-platform issues before checking in your code and test on real devices directly within IDE.
• Integrate continuous testing seamlessly into your DevOps CI/CD processes and release at high speed. You can run regression tests, monitor key performance metrics, and release quickly.

Is Kobiton better than Appium?

Created by Selenium, Appium has really saved the day when it comes to mobile application automation by solving the challenge of device fragmentation in relation to mobile automation. Appium is an open-source test automation framework for both native and hybrid mobile applications and utilizes a client-server protocol that provides the ability to execute one script for both Android and iOS devices. This greatly eliminates the need for duplicate scripts to achieve hybrid mobile application automation, however, this approach is far slower than native mobile application automation frameworks.

Kobiton has created its own Appium server and removed all the ‘fluff’. Not only does Kobiton support Appium, but Kobiton also offers a faster solution when leveraging Appium scripts. Additionally, Kobiton has focused heavily on both the automation engineer currently using Appium and the manual testing team that is looking to make the move to automation. With AI-driven Scriptless Automation that can be converted into Appium scripts, and AI-assisted Appium automation, you can easily make the move and/or scale your mobile test automation with Kobiton & Appium.

Features:

• Real Device Management – Offering 400+ real devices in the public cloud, along with private cloud, local hosting, or hybrid of real device solutions.
• Scriptless & Script-based Automation – Achieve accessible and scalable Mobile Application Automation from both scriptless & script-based automation.
• Visual Validation – Release pixel perfect applications across all devices and go beyond UI testing by capturing the essence of what makes an app beautiful.
• Text Assertions – Ensure consistency of text content and text colors
• Data-Driven Testing – Create data-sets and parameterize functional testing
• Crash Detection – Catch app crashes and present crash logs all in one place
• Performance Assertions – Flag test steps that ‘take too long’ and analyze performance regressions across devices
• Role-based Access Control – Provide granular control over organization, teams, and users by assigning permissions and creating custom roles
• Session Exploration – Know what failed, why, and when with rich logging and system metrics for true root-cause analysis

Pricing:

• Start up – $500 / year
• Accelerate – $2000 / year
• Scale – $8000 / year
• Growth – $16,000 / year
• Enterprise – Contact support

#2. Katalon Studio

Best for all levels (beginner to experts) and team sizes.

Katalon Studio is an automated testing tool that helps you automate Web, API, and Desktop applications. It comes with a smart analytics and CI/CD integrations.

Automation teams can get the most out of their time and focus by setting up a new project quickly and executing tests quickly.

It helps you overcome common web UI test automation challenges like popups, iFrames, and wait time.

Features:

• It is easy to install and setup the environment.
• It comes with an object repositories and keyword libraries.
• It has built-in templates to help testers quickly build and execute their test automation scripts.
• It supports multiple platforms: Windows 32 and 64 (7, 8, and 10) and OS X 10.5+.
• It allows integration with third-party platforms like Jira and Slack, TestRail. Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft Teams. BrowserStack, Kobiton, etc.
• It provides support for native plugins for the most famous CI tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, TeamCity, and more.
• It supports multiple data sources (such as XLS, CSV) and databases with effective mapping to maximize test coverage.
• It comes with features like error detection and load testing, automatic alerts, project management.
• It provides custom templates can be used for data migration.

Verdict: Katalon is one of the best software for automated testing and Appium alternative. It offers a rich set of built-in automation keywords for fast scripting. You can speed up ad hoc inspection and alteration of variables, codes, or any other aspects of the runtime environment without any hassle. It can efficiently locate, detect, and store all the test objects in order to speed up the scripting process.

Pricing:

• Studio Enterprise – $839 /license
• Runtime Engine – $599 /license

#3. Selenium

Best for automating web browsers.

Selenium is an open-source test automation tool that automates web browsers.

It allows you to create test scripts using programming languages including Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, etc.,

It communicates with the browser directly to control it.

• Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) allows us to record and playback the test scripts.
• Selenium WebDriver is a browser automation framework that accepts commands and sends them to a browser.
• Selenium Grid is a tool used to run tests in parallel on many machines with different browsers and operating systems.

Features:

• Multi-Browser Compatibility – It supports most web browsers, including IE, Safari, and Firefox. With simple commands, you can launch any browser. Selenium WebDriver also supports the HTMLUnitDriver and AndroidDriver.
• Multilingual Support – This software supports almost all programming languages, including JavaScript, JavaScript, and Java, Python, and C #. WebDriver allows users to select any programming language to create their own automation test scripts. You can write automation scripts more efficiently by using switch statements, conditional statements, and decision-making statements. This will allow you to make your automation script stronger and will be able to handle all situations.
• Handling Dynamic Web Elements – When performing automation testing, dynamic handling of web elements is a common issue. WebDriver is able to better handle dynamic web elements such as alerts, dropdowns, and checkboxes. It can also upload files.
• Community Support – The support for the Selenium is community forum-based, thus allowing regular upgrades and updates. All the updates are available and do not require any kind of training. Thus, this makes Selenium a budget-friendly tool.

Verdict:  Selenium is one of the best portable and open-source web browser testing tools and Appium alternatives. It provides solutions to cope with some of the potential problems in automation testing. It helps testers deal with some of the complex web elements like alerts, radio buttons, and checkboxes via dynamic locators. This tool supports various OS such as Mac, Linux, UNIX, and Windows. Selenium scripts can also work on different platforms and OS.

Pricing: Free

#4. Sauce Labs 

Best for Software Development Engineers in Test (SDET), Quality Engineers and QA teams.

Sauce Labs is a cloud-based testing platform that offer multiple variants of browser/OS combinations, mobile emulators & simulators, and real devices. With the help of Sauce Labs, even non-technical team members become capable of QA at scale because of its wide range of features. It provides continuous testing cloud, ensuring leading apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, OS, and device. 

Features:

• Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud provides instant access to the test coverage, scalability, and analytics that QA and dev teams need, and enables them to test across more than 900 browser/OS combinations, more than 200 mobile emulators, and simulators, and more than 2,000 real devices. 
• In addition to being cross-browser and cross-platform, Sauce Labs includes a flexible automation architecture. You can create test cases, change parameters, and run the program at any time.
• Debugging tools like videos, screenshots, log files help developers pinpoint regressions and debug faster.
• It seamlessly add automated testing to your CI/CD pipeline.
• It allows you to perform visual regression testing.

Verdict: Its end-to-end mobile and cross-browser testing solutions provide you the speed, confidence, and collaboration tools you need in order to deliver the best web, hybrid, and native mobile apps to the marketplace. Sauce Labs ensure that your mobile applications and APIs work as they should in real-world scenarios on any device and browser. It accelerates mobile releases with comprehensive device coverage, secure application distribution, easy collaboration, and faster feedback across development cycles.

Pricing:

• Live Testing – $39/Month Billed annually
• Virtual Cloud – $149/Month Billed annually
• Real Device Cloud – $199/Month Billed annually

#5. Perfecto Mobile

Best for mobile app testing.

Perfecto Mobile is a mobile testing tool that allows you to test your apps on both real devices, emulators, and simulators without the hassle of device maintenance.

Perfecto helps you create a continuous testing environment which speeds up mobile and web application tests.

Features:

• It integreate with all your tools from test frameworks like Appium and XCUITest to CI tools like Jenkins and Jira test management.
• It provides detaileed reports, heatmaps, and root cause analysis.
• Supports thousands of devices, operating systems, and browsers.
• It supports cross browser testing and geolocation testing.
• Perfecto’s codeless testing method allows you to create automated test cases using Artificial Intelligence. AI Approach allows for the creation of robust and stable test cases that will allow testing to be done in an unstable environment. This feature allows you to create automated test suites that require minimal maintenance.

Verdict: It is an unified platform to test your web and mobile apps at scale.

Pricing:

• Live – Starting at $83/month
• Automate – Starting at $125/month
• Scriptless – Contact for Pricing
• Enterprise – Contact for Pricing

#6. TestProject

Best for both testers and developers who is looking for a free test automation platform for web, mobile, and API testing.

TestProject was acquired by Tricentis in June 2019.

TestProject is a free test automation tool. This community powered tool is used for web, mobile, and API testing.

TestProject is developed on top of open source tools Selenium and Appium and simplifies the usage of both Selenium and Appium.

TestProject offers a Smart Test Recorder (in-browser recorder) to automatically record and create an automated tests just by walking through the application. The Test Recorder is very useful for beginners who have no programming or automation experience. It allows new QA enthusiasts to get into test automation without having any prior programming experience.

Features:

• It helps you record, develop, and analyze test automation.
• Its in-browser recorder allows you to record test cases to easily automate web, Android, and iOS apps.
• It allows you to run automated tests on a variety of browsers
• It supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS operating systems.
• It supports both Android and iOS supported mobile devices.
• It comes with a beautiful reports with detailed screenshots and logs.
• It can be integrated with tools such as Jenkins, Slack, email notifications and any service that supports web hooks.
• It is easy to use and comes with excellent documentation.

Verdict: It is an end-to-end test automation platform for web, mobile, and API testing. Test Project is an ideal tool for businesses that require a set of standardized test cases that they can use to verify the functionality of their products or services. Moreover, the tool enables them to save time and money by reducing the number of test cases that they need to run and by making the process of validating the software easier.

Pricing: Free

Conclusion

If you are looking for the best mobile and application automation tools, Appium is the top choice. But like every other testing platform, it also has some drawbacks like difficult setup process, crash problems, and so on.

Appium Testing has never been easier. This list of best Appium alternatives and competitors will skyrocket your mobile testing.

The top alternatives to Appium we recommend include Kobiton, Katalon Studio, Perfecto Mobile, and so on.

Do you have any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments below!

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Disclaimer

All information contained here is based on publicly available information and is deemed correct but not warranted. Any errors or omissions should be brought to our attention, and prospective customers are encourage to do independent research.