Appium vs. Flutter by Google

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Appium
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Flutter
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.N/A
Pricing
AppiumFlutter by Google
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppiumFlutter
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppiumFlutter by Google
Considered Both Products
Appium
Chose Appium
Most of mobile testing tools which are available in the market are paid license tools. But Appium is Open source mobile testing tool. We can create customised automation framework using Appium. It also supports various languages such as Java, Javascript etc. And also supports …
Chose Appium
The main reason we selected Appium is that we had people experienced in WebDriver API and some framework solutions in place, so given our setup, it provided a faster and cheaper kick-off. Another reason we selected Appium was that SauceLabs had pretty good support for Appium …
Chose Appium
Appium is a wrapper of selenium and is available for mobile based applications. It has also the similar features as selenium has for website automation. Together both provide a combined solution for automating web and mobile apps. Can provide end to end automation with a …
Chose Appium
Appium is comparable with Calabash because it's the only cross-platform tool like appium. Espresso is only to automate Android tests and XCTest is only for iOS. We selected Appium because it solves a lot of automation situations and gestures of the mobile apps. We've used …
Chose Appium
If you're an Apple developer, you use Xcode. It's practically a forced necessity. For system testing though, it doesn't have to be. You can have your development team focus on unit and integration tests in their platform and another team automate acceptance tests with a …
Chose Appium
Hard to compare Appium to Xcode and Android sdk because Appium uses them, but those are the only comparisons I could come up with to compare Appium with another product. I'm sure there may be other mobile automation tools, but none are as mainstream as Appium or with the …
Chose Appium
I have not used any other product that compares to Appium in the realm of mobile automated testing.
Chose Appium
Appium is one of the most valuable fully featured open-source tools with good support for iOS and Android mobile automation which cannot be matched even by enterprise tools.
Flutter
Chose Flutter
Flutter is well documented and powered by Google. Flutter's user interface and user experience is slightly better than React Native.
Chose Flutter
I have experience with react and react native. I would say that the idea behind all those frameworks are quite similar.
However, I found the javascript-based frameworks a bit more accessible as you could utilise your javascript knowledge. Here, Flutter works with its own …
Chose Flutter
I have used Flutter for cross-platform applications which are unique in the tech industry, I like the user interface created with Flutter.
Chose Flutter
- Like it better than other solutions, or building native on both platforms.
- React Native has a good advantage with language and amazing web support.
- React Native is easier to jump in for web engineers.
Chose Flutter
I have not used Dev Express Universal and Selenium Web Driver much besides in the demos that were provided to our company. We compared the demos and went with Google Flutter because it worked well and looked noticeably better than the other products. While I am unsure of the …
Chose Flutter
Flutter is a bit different from Android Studio, the latter one being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) while Flutter itself is a Cross-Platform Mobile Development SDK (Software Development Kit). Flutter provides the access to the native features and built-in plugins …
Chose Flutter
I selected Flutter because of Flutter's awesome, pre-build UI components. It makes my life as an indie dev easy and fun. At the time, I had never built an application with React Native, so this was a fantastic introduction to cross-platform development. That said, as someone …
Chose Flutter
I think that Flutter is now much better than Microsoft's Xamarin and the old Apache Cordova. I was able to go from a concept design to a working application in almost no time and with almost no experience with Dart at all. It helps (but it is not a requirement) to have some …
Chose Flutter
Way less tweaking to have a cross-platform experience, better performance, and feels more like a native app.
But the community, while growing, is still smaller than React Native. This can cause issues with specific use cases as it's harder to find help online.
Chose Flutter
React Native seemed like a comparable and equally valid choice to Flutter. Performance, ease of development, and support are roughly equal between the two products. Dart, to me, felt easier to work with than Javascript or Typescript. Flutter SDK tools and VSCode extensions made …
Chose Flutter
The app generated by Flutter doesn't change upon OS versions as in native apps or other cross-platform apps. The running speed of apps is much faster than its competitors like react-native and Cordova. It's lightweight and faster to compare to other cross-platform. The hot …
Chose Flutter
The main alternative to Flutter I have experience with, is Qt framework. For a long time, Qt was the go-to if you wanted a cross platform desktop application, probably written in C++ or Python, that could take on the 'look and feel' of the target platform. However, Qt is …
Best Alternatives
AppiumFlutter by Google
Small Businesses
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppiumFlutter by Google
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppiumFlutter by Google
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium works well for well-structured mobile applications test automation that is particularly easy to leverage when different pages of the app use similar building blocks. If it takes time for some content in the app to be rendered, ask your dev team to add progress indicators and ensure they are accessible. That might be more complicated to do with Appium, though, if there's no good contact with Dev team established so you can request accessibility IDs added quickly enough when needed. Appium supports another locator strategies as well though (such as xPath or iOS class chain on iOS) but they wouldn't work as fast so you may get really slow tests.
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Flutter is well known for native app development, if you have android studio installed on your system, you can quickly start using it. This might not be the best choice for you if you do not wish to learn a new language, i.e. Dart and you do not know it already.
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Pros
  • Crossdevice: With Appium you can automate tests for Android and iOS both. There is no need to learn more than 1 language.
  • Easy: It's really easy to configure and use appium; it's very useful when you're testing strategy is based on "developers write tests".
  • Open Source: It's such a nice strength of appium, because you don't need to pay to use a good tool like Appium is.
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  • It is powered by Google, so a great technical community is backing it.
  • The development of native apps is an easy process using Flutter.
  • As it is an open-source tool, we can use it without paying anything.
  • It provides nice UI options.
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Cons
  • There are a number of expected methods that are not implemented, yet. With a similar sounding name as Selenium with similar functions, people who are familiar with Selenium try to use methods that appear to be available, but give a "not yet implemented" exception when run.
  • Documentation can be confusing.
  • Setup was a difficult process. This may not necessarily be the case once you figure everything out, but the whole figuring it out process was difficult and I ran into many, many problems when I first started.
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  • Occasionally updates to the Flutter SDK result in wide-sweeping changes that seem to not be thoroughly tested and considered. Flutter sometimes evolves too fast for its own good.
  • While the 3rd-party Flutter package ecosystem is vast and rich, 1st-party support for basic things (audio/video playback, battery information, Bluetooth services, etc.) are lacking. You are occasionally forced to rely on an open-source package for use-cases that other platforms have native support for.
  • Documentation, particularly around testing, is lacking. While there are some great docs, like the Dart Style Guide, many Flutter-focused support documents are lacking in quality and real-world usability.
  • Flutter allows you to architect an app however you want. While this is a great feature, it also adds complexity and leads to the current state of Flutter's state management, where there are 50+ options on how to organize your app, with very little official guidance or recommendations from the Flutter team. For a beginner, this can create decision paralysis.
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Likelihood to Renew
I am rating 10/10 because Appium can use with multiple programming languages with multiple Test engines. Also, it works for both Android and iOS.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
I would like to give 9/10 rating to Appium because of it can easily integrate with popular frameworks and CI/CD tools, as well as it is reliable, flexible and easy to use. The setup can bit complex in initial step, but once on configured it's very easy to use and enables stable and scalable mobile automation for real and cloud devices.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Most of mobile testing tools which are available in the market are paid license tools. But Appium is Open source mobile testing tool. We can create customised automation framework using Appium. It also supports various languages such as Java, Javascript etc. And also supports various operating systems such as Android, IOS etc. We can easily integrate Appium frameworks with CI/CD [Jenkins, Git etc].
Read full review
I have experience with react and React Native. I would say that the idea behind all those frameworks are quite similar. However, I found the javascript-based frameworks a bit more accessible as you could utilise your javascript knowledge. Here, Flutter works with its own language. This has advantages and disadvantages sometimes. I found the community around javascript frameworks bigger and therefore sometimes more helpful. However, Flutter does a good job here as well. I think the main argument for Flutter is its usability for less experienced developers. If you do not have knowledge in javascript or other programming languages then I think it is much easier to start with Flutter than with another framework like react. I think the package that you get form scratch is better than in the other frameworks were you have to set up and learn a lot more before you can start.
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Return on Investment
  • For cost of ownership, the increase is positive times infinity, as it's free to install and use
  • Lead time for suite development can be a negative, if not planned for during sprint planning
  • Using Appium to execute tests in parallel across a cloud solution can improve CI/CD cycles by 100's of a percent
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  • The rapid development capabilities of Flutter allow us to build apps we could not have previously considered commercially viable, opening new revenue streams.
  • Free and open licensing made adoption very easy (ie. free/low cost!).
  • In comparison to Qt, our time spent arguing with build tools and perfecting development environments has decreased substantially.
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