Sauce Labs vs Terraform: What are the differences?
What is Sauce Labs? Test mobile or web apps instantly across 700+ browser/OS/device platform combinations - without infrastructure setup. Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.
What is Terraform? Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers. With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Sauce Labs and Terraform are primarily classified as "Browser Testing" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Sauce Labs are:
- 700+ browser/OS/device combinations for cross-browser and platform testing to improve web and mobile app quality and eliminate the overhead of internal infrastructure
- Highly reliable, on-demand cloud for enterprise-grade scalability and industry standard security
- Optimized for popular testing frameworks, CI systems, and surrounding tools and services
On the other hand, Terraform provides the following key features:
- Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
- Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
- Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
"Selenium-compatible" is the top reason why over 54 developers like Sauce Labs, while over 81 developers mention "Infrastructure as code" as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 510 company stacks & 313 developers stacks; compared to Sauce Labs, which is listed in 66 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.
