TrustRadius Insights for Appium are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Easy-to-configure and easy-to-use automation tool: Users have found Appium to be an easy-to-configure and easy-to-use automation tool for testing Android and iOS devices. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the simplicity and user-friendly nature of the tool, making it accessible for test automation engineers with different levels of expertise.
Open-source tool with strong community support: Many users have praised Appium for being an open-source tool, meaning it is free to use and has a strong community support. This allows users to access a wide range of resources, including forums and documentation, where they can seek help or share their experiences with other members of the community.
Excellent user interface application for designing test cases: Appium offers an excellent user interface application that assists in designing test cases by providing a preview of app screens and retrieving element names for interaction. Some reviewers have highlighted how this feature simplifies the process of creating effective test scripts, ultimately improving productivity in mobile app testing.
Appium is Open source and we are making use of it in multiple projects. The one framework is WebdriverIO and Appium, other one Appium and Java. Appium is very useful for mobile automation for both Android and IOS platform. Also it is easy to implement Appium with any language such as Java, Javascript etc
Pros
Launch/Reset App
Swipe Actions, Gestures
Switch to webview
Orientation Landscape/Potrait
Cons
Click by co-ordinates in IOS using appium
Deep links testing
test execution in IOS is slower compared to Android
Likelihood to Recommend
1. It's open source which supports range of languages, operating systems and languages. Well suited for Android and IOS mobile automation. Supports all kinds of apps, which makes it flexible and robust mobile testing tool 2. It is less appropriate where we need intercept network call to verify the API calls. Extensive coding experience is required to work Appium
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Our organization using Appium for a long. Appium is very good for mobile automation and it is being used by the whole orgnization based on the project. Appium is allowing us to find the element via Xpath, id, classpath, text, CSS e.t.c. Also, it helps us to automate mobile applications in an easy way.
Pros
Finding the elements on mobile
Appium server
locators like: Xpath, id, classname and many.
Cons
While using appium, it is taking long time for launching the application in mobile.
Likelihood to Recommend
While automating any mobile application/software, Appium is very useful and suitable. Appium makes it easy to automate the software.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Appium is used (along with other tools for automation such as Espresso) across all Mobile Testing projects in our company. It is primarily used as the main harness for Android and iOS test automation frameworks. The problem we address by using Appium is automating repeated human work as well as scaling testing for multiple mobile devices.
Pros
It uses WebDriver API so it makes it easy to use for former web test automation engineers.
It can be managed via the command line via an extensive set of parameters.
It handles implicit waits at the server side that is especially valuable in distributed infrastructure.
Cons
There were some cases when Appium caused the application under test to crash. We were unable to allocate the reason at the support forums.
It has some backward compatibility issues. Although Appium developers state it's fully backward compatible, we still need to use particular combinations of Appium's mobile OS version to keep the most robust setup. The wrong combination may cause Appium to be unable to interact with some elements in the tested app.
It uploads WebDriver agent to iOS devices, and that may hang sometimes after several tests execution as its cache gets polluted.
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Appium is used in our project to automate mobile application test cases. Our organisation has mobile apps on Android and IOS for different OS versions. With Appium we are able to automate test cases for mobile applications for native, hybrid and web apps. Appium supports multiple Android and mobile browsers. It is used by the IT department.
Pros
Appium has no dependency on mobile OS whether it is android or IOS.
It supports multiple programming language like java, python, ruby , C# etc.
Supports automation of hybrid, native and web apps
Open Source and huge community support
Selenium webdriver compatible
Supports multiple test framework
Cons
Appium configuration is a bit complex and tricky some times to implement all kind of mobile OS versions
There should be some utility to compare screens of mobile apps
A skilled automation tester is required to build the quality code for automating mobile test cases
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited scenarios:
For testing multiple Mobile OS versions like Android and IOS
To implement automation of different app types, like hybrid, native and web.
To integrate into the same framework with Selenium web driver.
To connect with 3rd party cloud services
Less suited scenario:
Skilled automation tester is not easily available.
Appium is used across the whole organization by teams which own the Android and iOS native applications. We're using it to automate large regression tests that by now we're running manually. Appium let us improve our release process duration and increase the speed of the regression phase, giving us the option of reducing the manual testing team to one person. At the moment, Appium is working with TestObject because with these 2 working together it's possible to increase the device coverage and the speed of the whole release process with a nice quality level.
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.
Cons
Element browser sometimes is unreliable and has sporadic fails.
Appium running is a bit slow, compared to tests written with Appium and with Espresso or XCTest.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium is well suited when you need to write automation tests with low costs. It's very simple to start up, configure and run. It doesn't depend on the application platform and is portable to many programming languages like Java, Ruby, etc. If you have a team of developers and SDETs and you need to increase the code coverage simply and fast, Appium is your best choice.
Creating a reusable and easily maintainable interface automation suite can be challenging. Work with iOS, your first thought is to use Xcode and write a suite alongside your unit and integration tests using Swift, but you don't need to. Utilizing Appium allows you to create a full-featured automation suite with one of many powerful languages other than Swift, yet access the full gamut of commands available XCUITest. Choosing Java, for instance, allows you to create a suite with JUnit and structure the project's execution with all the availability of Java's support libraries.
Pros
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
Provides a generally accessible documentation suite on the web, which you will reference quite often
Handles the connection between Appium's server and Xcode's tools during execution well
Cons
Execution against live iOS devices can be quite slow. This will likely be improved in the near future
Challenging for a new user to take on without guidance from a veteran
Upgrading to a new version of Xcode before the tool is updated can render you suite useless, until an update is available
Likelihood to Recommend
If you want a full featured suite of interface tests using a language other than Swift for iOS projects, Appium is second to none. Appium allows you to separate an automated system test suite from Xcode and offload its execution to a cloud solution. If your suite is a smaller smoke test, you may be better off simply using Xcode.
At this time, my team is only using Appium, but this will most likely change as other teams have automation needs with mobile devices. The main reason why Appium is a good choice for us is that it allows for tests to interact easily with both Android and iOS devices. Instead of using one toolset for Android and another for iOS, Appium combines how automation functions with each platform and puts it all into one library.
Pros
Allows for a one-stop library to interact with both Android and iOS devices.
Appium has the backing of Sauce Labs, so there's considerable support for this library.
It's free! Open source with a lot of community support.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
When testing on both Android and iOS (and who isn't?) then Appium is a great option. If there are some special scenarios that are needed to be tested like working with a device's file system or anything that might be outside of the app (maybe switching between apps while testing) then Appium may not meet all of your needs. I say that cautiously because there may be some functionality that I'm just not aware of yet or maybe coming soon that would work with this. I just haven't come across it, yet.
Appium is used by my team, QA Automation, to assist in automating testing for our mobile iOS and Android applications. Appium helps increase our automated testing coverage to handle mobile, it is open-source and cross-platform compatible and handles native, hybrid, and mobile web applications which are a huge business problem.
Pros
It works across multiple platforms.
It is an open source project.
It can handle native, hybrid and mobile web applications.
Cons
Since it is open source, we're at the hands of the developers whenever there is a business critical emergency.
We've run into issues which are not well documented and have spent considerable time communicating back and forth between the appium team to resolve them.
Setup could be simplified.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium is perfectly suited for anyone trying to automate their testing suite to cover mobile applications. Since it is open-source it is continually being improved and does not require any expensive licensing fees to get that mobile application coverage needed. If that is a non-issue, it would be preferable to use another tool that is better documented and has a support team to diagnose any issues.
We have mobile banking application as one of our products and we used Appium as our primary mobile automation framework to test our application. Appium enables automate all the regression, smoke and functional test scenarios across both Android and iOS platforms. We are using Appium with Java 17 + TestNG and this framework reduced our manual testing effort and also improve the regression speed, product quality, stability and fast delivery.
Pros
With use Appium we can maintain single framework for both iOS and Android automation.
Appium supports Real Devices, Emulators and Cloud hosted devices like Browserstack, Kobiton.
Appium allow to inspect elements in the UIs. Support for both Android and iOS.
Cons
Test Execution Speed - Especially in device farm executions it may be slow execution due to driver communication.
Sometimes may be complex to implement scrolling methods.
Setup and configuration - This may be difficult to new users.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium is well suited For, 1) Cross-Platform Mobile Automation - As I mentioned before Appium can use automate both Android and iOS applications. 2) Best Option For reduce regression test effort - Appium automation frameworks can execute your Regression suites fast than the manual regression test. 3) Device Compatibility Testing - If you want to perform your test on different devices, you can run same scripts on different devices by integrate with device farms.
Appium is less Appropriate For 1) Load and Performance Testing
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
It is an indispensable tool for mobile automation and helps a lot in converting manual test cases to automated scripts. Being an open source tool, it yields good ROI.
Pros
Best part is that it's an open-source tool.
Supports multiple mobile platforms.
It supports native apps, mobile web & hybrid applications of both Android and iOS.
It is based on Selenium using HTTP protocols.
It supports most of the scripting languages like Java, Ruby, Java script, etc.
It can be integrated with CI tools.
Cons
It should provide reliable & promising executions every time, without any interruptions
Avoid any synchronization issues
Supporting to Windows mobile applications also in future.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appium is well suited for native, mobile web, and hybrid applications of android and iOS but it does not support Windows mobile applications.
Verified User
Team Lead in Quality Assurance (1001-5000 employees)