Espresso vs Firebase Test Lab

Free and open source

From $1 per device hour (physical devices, indicative)

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

Pay-as-you-go per device hour on the Blaze plan; virtual devices are cheaper than physical.

Everything, self-hosted

Free daily quota of virtual and physical device minutes on the Spark plan.

Category standard

Google · since 2013

Widely used

Google · since 2016

• 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.

• Very cheap per device hour compared with commercial device clouds.
• Robo Test finds crashes with zero test-writing effort.
• Tight integration with Android tooling and Firebase Crashlytics.

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

• Device selection is far narrower than a dedicated device cloud.
• iOS support is meaningfully thinner than Android.
• No interactive manual testing session.

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

Android-first teams that want real-device coverage at the lowest cost.