BrowserStack Review

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Review of BrowserStack powered by the Slant community.

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Pros

Pro
Good selection of developer tools

IE, FF, Safari, Chrome and Opera come with additional web development browser extensions installed, such as Firebug or YSlow.

Pro
Easy to use UI

Pro
Huge variety of OSs, browsers and devices

There are over 200 desktop/mobile/tablet browser-platform combinations possible.

Pro
Integration with CI services

Pro
Get screenshots across many devices

Can request screenshots from many devices for comparison.

Pro
I can easily test websites on my local development

Pro
Free JS unit tests for open-source projects

Developers are advised to use the contact form. The JavaScript API is free for open source projects. Unclear whether automated testing with Selenium is also free - apparently not?

Pro
Selenium automation integration

Pro
Run concurrent tests in parallel

Open source project accounts are limited to at most two concurrent VMs.

Pro
Might be able to test on real iOS devices

It's not very clear if real iOS devices are available for automated testing.

On one hand, https://www.browserstack.com/mobile-browser-emulator is all about emulators for both Android and iOS.

On the other, https://www.browserstack.com/automate says

"Test across real iOS devices and Android mobile emulators"

Then again, https://www.browserstack.com/list-of-browsers-and-platforms?product=automate lists "real iOS devices".

Cons

Con
Sessions are rejected instead of queued up when all VMs are in use

Con
Security incident in 2014

Con
Real Apple devices are unreliable as of August 2015

Real Apple devices are a new feature that BrowserStack has introduced. At the moment (August 2015) there are unreliable. Excerpt from an email reply from BrowserStack support:

we provide real iOS devices (Beta) and iOS simulators for Selenium browser testing on Automate. Since these devices are in beta, you might encounter a few problems while running tests on them.