Our team has trialed Saucelabs and browser stack. Both services seem to take an order of magnitude longer to run tests than my local browser. I would expect the cloud browsers to be a BIT slower, but we’re talking more than double or triple the time to run on the cloud vs local. Does anyone have experience with another service that isn’t so slow? Or maybe I’m doing something wrong with my config. Any ideas or help appreciated.
Upon using cloud browsers, a ‘middleware’ connection from the client needs to be established to connect to the desired service provider first, and then execution will actually happen.
There are many factors involving in this process:
- Network connection
- Test script
- Browser availability on the cloud servers
- The application under test
Cloud browsers are born with the main target is to provide as much as coverage the test scripts need to be executed for the current AUT , and there will be a trade-off such as execution speed in this case.
You need to measure and separate how much time does it take to boot up to cloud browsers first and then try to optimize it using official documentation from cloud service provider pages. I believe they all have these kinds of documents.
I believe you should only execute test scripts on cloud browsers in the nightly cycle on the CI server to cut off unnecessary wait for the cloud browsers to be booted up 
so that results can be observed on the next day. Katalon Studio does provide an appropriate way to make life easier .
In the case of local browsers, you can utilize some external Selenium Grid likable such as Zalenium
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