BrowserStack vs Vagrant: What are the differences?
What is BrowserStack? Instant access to a lab of 1000+ real mobile and desktop browsers for testing. Live, Web-Based Browser Testing
Instant access to all real mobile and desktop browsers. Say goodbye to your lab of devices and virtual machines.
What is Vagrant? A tool for building and distributing development environments. Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
BrowserStack can be classified as a tool in the "Browser Testing" category, while Vagrant is grouped under "Virtual Machine Management".
Some of the features offered by BrowserStack are:
- Real Device Cloud.
Test on a range of physical Android and iOS mobile devices and tablets for the most accurate results
- 1100+ desktop browsers. Latest versions of IE, Edge, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and more on a range of Windows and OS X platforms on a robust cloud infrastructure
- Test dev environments. Our Local Testing feature allows you to test development and internal websites seamlessly, without setup or configuration
On the other hand, Vagrant provides the following key features:
- Boxes
- Up And SSH
- Synced Folders
"Multiple browsers", "Ease of use" and "Real browsers" are the key factors why developers consider BrowserStack; whereas "Development environments", "Simple bootstraping" and "Free" are the primary reasons why Vagrant is favored.
Vagrant is an open source tool with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.74K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Vagrant's open source repository on GitHub.
Airbnb, Shopify, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Vagrant, whereas BrowserStack is used by ebay, Typeform, and Wikipedia. Vagrant has a broader approval, being mentioned in 802 company stacks & 478 developers stacks; compared to BrowserStack, which is listed in 579 company stacks and 238 developer stacks.
