Review of most popular Cross-Browser Testing Tools

First, let's see what Cross-browser testing is all about?

Imagine if you have spent all of this time, money and energy building a website which looks great. But, what if I told you your website looks crapy, and works awful on some of the browsers? Yes, this happens a lot, and you are probably losing some costumers, users and visitors over it.

What can you do about this?

Well you could test, test and then test your site again on all of the different browsers and making sure that the web sites and web apps you create work and look great on all of them. But there are thousands of browsers and devices out there, and the new ones keep popping up every day. Sorry, but as a web developer, it is your responsibility to make sure that not only do your projects work, but they work for all your users, no matter what browser, device, or additional assistive tools they are using. You need to think about:

• Different browsers other than the one or two that you use regularly on your devices, including slightly older browsers that some people might still be using, which don't support all the latest, shiniest CSS and JavaScript features.
• Different devices with different capabilities, from the latest greatest tablets and smartphones, through smart TVs, right down to cheap tablets and even older feature phones that may run browsers with limited capabilities.
• People with disabilities, who use the Web with the aid of assistive technologies like screenreaders, or don't use a mouse (some people use only the keyboard).

And this is where cross-browser testing tolls come to play. Let's cover a few. 

LambdaTest

LambdaTest is my absolute favorite. It is a scalable, modern, cloud-based cross browser testing platform designed to offer all website or web app testing needs to cloud infrastructure.

This tool has 2000+ combinations of desktop and mobile browsers on the cloud and also offers a developer-oriented tool - LT browser to assess the responsiveness of your website. With over 25+ devices to choose from, interactive dev tools and scroll sync. You can even create your own custom devices and test localhost URL without any extensions or tunnels.

Cheapest but most comprehensive cross-browser testing tool I have tried out and we use it at Bebabit to this day. The UI is pretty clean and easy to navigate, and you can figure all out just at first glance. Choices of browsers are massive and responsive testing is easy as a cake. Did I mention it also the cheapest tool on the market. 

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is a cloud-based tool to check web application compatibility on the web, desktop, and mobile browsers. It is an excellent tool to test web and mobile applications efficiently and simply. The user interface it provides is intuitive and easy to use, greatly facilitating the task of testing and solving errors. You can test desktop, production as well as public web servers using online JavaScript or Selenium automated test suites. It supports proxies, firewalls, and Active Directory and features like responsive testing, screenshots, APIs and local testing.
But its not all perfect. I’ve found that Browserstack can be flakey when it reaches the maximum number of running nodes. Also, the error thrown in that case is not really indicative of the problem, and it can be rather confusing (typical error in this case is the “Connection refused. Is selenium server started?”)

Smartbear CrossBrowserTesting

A solid, yet pricy modern cross-browser testing tool. It has great potential, but I must say, it's not there yet. At a price point of 39 $ / month, you can probably do better. When doing automated testing we have experienced tests fail due to a timeout when Selenium is waiting for a response for a command it sent. (ex: A step in the test is to click on a button, we can trace the command being sent, but a response never comes back). The mobile browsers fail a lot so it makes it hard to rely on for mobile testing. And the rendering can be misrepresented a lot as well. It makes sanse to give it a try, but at Bebabit, we have settled on using Lambda test.