# KIF iOS Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Mobile Development Frameworks](https://www.g2.com/categories/mobile-development-frameworks) **Average Rating:** 3.8/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 14 ## About KIF iOS Keep It Functional - An iOS Functional Testing Framework ## KIF iOS Reviews ### 1. KIF is a Solid Integration Testing Framework **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** Easy to implement and get up and running with the testing platform. Tests app by tapping buttons and performs integration testing that is different from the built in unit testing framework. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** The documentation for KIF is somewhat lacking. I had to do a fair amount of digging/Googling in order to figure out how to use it on some occasions. This also causes KIF to have a steep learning curve. Can be buggy at times especially for newly released versions of iOS. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** It's a solid solution and has its own benefits over using Xcode's built-in UI Testing. Works with Travis CI and Jenkins as well which is a big thumbs up in in my book. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trying to avoid introducing regressions while building out a product. For this KIF is essential. Basically a more comprehensive unit test and provides regression avoidance at the integration testing level. ### 2. Good integration test framework **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 08, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** I like KIF because it's fast and easy to integrate with my iOS projects (github or cocoapods). It works with Xcode tools too, I configure it to work with a custom test bot. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** I need to remove Kif Framework from my app before subit it to the app store because it use a private APIs **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Now i can test my code using XCTest and bots. ### 3. KIF is great for developers writing their own tests **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark G. | Web and Mobile Software Developer, Design, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** KIF works really well for what it does. I found writing tests to be straightforward and I enjoyed the workflow of writing everything in one language (Objective C) and seeing the results of my UI tests in XCode right next to the results of my unit tests. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** I have no complaints with KIF itself. It's a great library for what it does and when it was made. The syntax is not particularly beautiful but that probably has more to do with Objective C itself than this library. The main issue is that other tools have come along that are probably more helpful, including increasingly better support for UI testing within XCode itself, but also tools like Appium which allow you to use existing Selenium toolsets and also to connect to Sauce Labs itself and their many devices and versions. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** If you're a small team where developers write and consume the tests and you want to work all in one language it could be a good fit. If you need to use Sauce Labs or Gherkin or have engineers with expertise in Selenium-based tools Appium might be a better fit. Finally I wouldn't use KIF on a new project without considering XCode 7's new UI testing tools first. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I just needed a quick and effective way to verify the UI worked and continued to work and as such it performed brilliantly. I was also using the Lela framework to verify screenshots of the UI. ### 4. KIF is like Xcode 7 UI testing, but more flexible **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeroen L. | Digital Athlete iOS aka. CocoaHead aka. iOS coding monkey, Media Production, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** KIF is a bit more flexible compared to the Apple provided default tools. Performance and integration with Xcode is good. When running the KIF UI tests in a continuous integration it should just work due to the fact that is is entirely based on XCTest. It is an open source library backed by Square, inc. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** Integrating KIF is more work, compared to the default tools provided by Apple in Xcode 7. Xcode does not provide support for recording of UI tests. It uses undocumented API provided by Apple, but there is no way around this. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** Have a good look at all options available. KIF is a valid choice, but it does introduce an extra dependency. Get involved with the community developing KIF, they are very helpful and are very open to improvements and suggestions. Be mindful of when and what UI to automatically test for regression. It is also important that your app has decent accessibility support. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automated integration testing allowed us to reduce the amount of regressions deployed to production. When initially choosing KIF Apple's new automated testing introduced in Xcode 7 was not yet available. The biggest benefit we realized was a reduced amount of bugs brought to production. ### 5. Apache **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ronner m. | Gerente, Wireless, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** fantastic as it is very easy to use and configure, you can create web pages tantio for static and dynamic **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** Everything is very complete excellent and is constantly updated . !! Nothing bothers me **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** recommended for anyone who wants to design a web page and its related **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has brought many benefits me in my work as web designer facilitates me all kinds of creation ### 6. KF for iOS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Music | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** * Being able to write automated tests in the same language as the development language. This is valuable because developers can write their own automated tests with the same tools and and skills they use everyday. * Integration with the Unit test targets. They are executed along unit tests by simply pressing CMD+U. Their results are presented inside Xcode without need for much extra configuration or special setups. * the Framework is clear and easy to understand **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** * Requires the setup of accessibility in order to be used. * Isn't very resilient to network conditions, or other asynchronous cases. * It can slow down total time of execution of tests while waiting for timeouts for asynchronous conditions. * Failing tests doesn't necessarily mean the code is broken, but that some required condition was not meet: network, backend down, etc. However, there is no way to discern from these two scenarios. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** KIF was definitively a great tool to implement automated tests on every iOS project, big or small. However, the latest version of Xcode now includes a framework that accomplishes this same purpose. Considering this important change in the landscape, I would prefer not to depend on a third party component when Xcode now has this capability. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** * Mainly used as a mechanism of defense against regressions. * this frees up time for testers and QA to focus on more difficult and valuable tasks. * and overall, increases the quality of the product and our confidence on changes. ### 7. Keep It Functional iOS testing framework **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aurélien L. | Mobile Software Engineer, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** KIF is an easy way to test the User Interface of your iOS application. pod 'KIF' It's still maintained and has several contributors (902 commits while writing this review). It runs from iOS 5.1 to recent versions of iOS. It's usable with Swift as well. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** You have to spend time setting up your accessibility labels on the UI elements you need to interact with, not difficult at all but it takes some certain amount of time. Nowadays I prefer to create a target for UI testing in my project, then using Xcode to record tests. It's even faster than writing KIF tests cases. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** Try using Xcode UI testing first, it might be exactly what you need. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using KIF you can solve issues with User Interface testing, reproduce a User behaviour within your app with an automated solution that you can script easily. Benefits: Script things you need to test regularly, authentication, navigation. It saves you the trouble of repeated tasks to test your UI. ### 8. Best automation testing framework for objective c developers. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kunal B. | Software Engineer, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** Comes with rich set of API's. Integrates with third party frameworks like RestKit. It takes very few mins to setup with test case. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** The overall performance is slow. The amount of time it takes to run a test suite is high. You can't run tests in parallel. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** If you are using swift then Apple's native UI testing framework might better suite your needs. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation testing for native apps. ### 9. Keep It Functional **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh G. | UX Engineer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** KIF's integration with XCTest and Xcode is really great. Additionally, unlike some of its counterparts it is actively maintained. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** Integration takes a fair amount of work and it uses private APIs which makes me a little uneasy given the rate at which Apple's toolset changes. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used KIF to automate UI testing for an iOS project. Saved our small team a bunch of time and effort when introducing new feature sets. ### 10. Easy Functional Testing for your App **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Keven B. | Freelance Senior iOS Developer & Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** KIF helps you to improve and automate the functional user testing. Integrating it in the app is very easy because it is integrated by writing the same language that you already using Objective-C. It also uses the standard XCTests integrated by Apple. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** It is hard to work with webviews in the beginning. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** If you want to save time and want an easy to use tool KIF will help you to easily setup functional testing for your app. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Functional Testing of the complete app. Saves time and man hours. ### 11. Nice and smooth experience **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** I really liked the easiness of usage, and the descriptive style of the programming. The API covers a lot of use cases, so I didn't have to struggle too much to find the right behavior. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** I would have preferred to have some more APIs to verify that a view I'm checking is in the right hierarchy, specifying an ancestor view. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** KIF is a really nice platform, and you should give it a try if you think that Apple's implementation of UI testing is not enough and doesn't fit well for you. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I really like to test the app as a whole, beside using regular unit tests. It is really easy to add coverage in a more user-facing way. ### 12. Great UI Testing framework **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Industrial Automation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** Simple to use, well documented, and has a large helpful user base. Great for testing any UI we've implemented in our products. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** Still actively being worked on so occasionally you will see bugs in behavior. Fortunately the community is really good about posting the bugs on github and getting fixes merged. **Recommendations to others considering KIF iOS:** This framework excels in finding the bugs and navigation issues and crashes within apps. We still had other testing needs that KIF is not really manufactured for. For those cases(such as data model/input/sanitation/etc) we still used traditional unit testing. **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helpful for continuous integration testing, especially if your UI has complicated behaviors. Great way to quickly identify issues that cause app breaks when dealing with user interaction. ### 13. I liked to write tests using KIF, it was easy to integrate and to use. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Balázs N. | iOS and web developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 27, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** Easy to identify UI elements, run my iOS apps automatically **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** First time it was hard to integrate with swift: https://www.natashatherobot.com/kif-swift-feature-testing/ **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm solving anyone's business problems :) I'm an independent iOS and webapp developer, and KIF tests make me functional testing available, which has a real benefit when I perform changes on the backend or in a common component in the front-end ### 14. Not perfect. **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Łukasz M. | iOS Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 27, 2016 **What do you like best about KIF iOS?** I do like the idea of UI testing. KiF made it possible for us to test different scenarios of our UI paths. **What do you dislike about KIF iOS?** The execution of it. Kinda hard to do something without drowning in the source code (at least when I was using it). **What problems is KIF iOS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Needed to test some scenarios, and with KiF it was possible. But really time consuming. ## KIF iOS Discussions - [What is KIF iOS used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-kif-ios-used-for) - [View KIF iOS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/kif-ios/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-16+00%3A25%3A58+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=b74c9030-7478-45eb-ac82-1e95cdfbd615&secure%5Btoken%5D=9da7f3260526be2982b1ea50fca03ec83619333ebfb54f816ef165a29d7d5be3&format=llm_user) ## KIF iOS Features **Functionality** - Language Support - Ease of Use - Integrations **Functionality** - Test Feedback - Test Variety - Emulation **Performance** - Power - Responsiveness - Lightweight **Management** - Test History - Automation - Organization **Support** - Tutorials - Documentation - Community ## Top KIF iOS Alternatives - [BrowserStack](https://www.g2.com/products/browserstack/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (3,240 reviews) - [Xcode](https://www.g2.com/products/xcode/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (995 reviews) - [Essential Studio](https://www.g2.com/products/essential-studio/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (698 reviews)