[Question] Why use "appium-device-farm" over Selenium Grid?

[kandji-joel]

@saikrishna321 @SrinivasanTarget @sudharsan-selvaraj I was pretty blown away when I gave appium-device-farm and appium-dashboard-plugin I try over the weekend. I can see a lot of benefits and use cases for using something like this over Selenium Grid, which requires a lot more overhead to maintain. I was hoping to get your takes on why this should be used over Selenium Grid (may be good to include in README as well)

Reasons to use appium-device-farm

• Native testing only (Appium)
• Easy setup for single machine infrastructure
• More session info out-of-box when coupled with appium-dashboard

Reasons to use Grid

• Native and web app testing (Appium and Selenium)
• Supports Appium (Grid 3 only) and Selenium
• ~~Support multi-machine infrastructure (Appium servers running on separate machines connected to same Grid)~~ will be supported in appium-device-farm in future release

[saikrishna321]

Can you also point your observations over grid please. We can document our understand as well

[primitivetypo]

Does appium-device-farm support parallel test distribution across all connected devices? Do i need to set up appium for parallel tests? Any sample code that works with parallel test distribution?

[saikrishna321]

@primitivetypo Do i need to [set up appium](https://appium.io/docs/en/advanced-concepts/parallel-tests/) for parallel tests? This plugin takes care of all the device and session management. You just need to trigger your tests in parallel from client.

[primitivetypo]

Thanks @saikrishna321

[saikrishna321]

@kandji-joel We are working on supporting Support multi-machine infrastructure you can have devices in multiple machines appium-device will take care of device, session and test orchestration.

[kandji-joel]

@saikrishna321 nice, that's incredible!

[saikrishna321]

@kandji-joel v2.0.0-beta1 has the remote execution support