Espresso vs Appium

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free. The real cost is the device lab or device-cloud subscription you run it against.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Google · since 2013

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2012

• Automatic UI-thread synchronisation makes tests both fast and reliable.
• First-party Google support, updated alongside Android itself.
• Runs on emulators in CI cheaply, including Firebase Test Lab.

• One API and one test suite for both platforms, in the language you already use.
• Every device cloud supports it, so you stay portable.
• No modification to the app under test — you test the same binary you ship.

• Android only.
• Testing across app boundaries requires UiAutomator alongside it.
• Compose testing uses a related but separate API to learn.

• Notoriously slow and flaky compared to the native frameworks it wraps.
• Setup is a genuine project: drivers, Xcode, provisioning, Android SDK, versions.
• Debugging failures across the Appium/driver/device layers takes real expertise.

Android teams that want the fastest, most reliable native UI tests.

Teams that must cover iOS and Android from a single suite and can absorb the setup cost.