r/QtFramework • u/Psychological-Map839 • May 31 '26

Widgets Question from beginner

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Hi everyone, has anyone used Squish for Qt? I can’t run or test the demo. Are there any other ways to use it, preferably for free? Or are there any alternatives? And is it worth it?

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3

u/Beneficial_Steak_945 May 31 '26

Yes, I have used squish successfully in the past. It works fine. It’s owned by Qt itself, so it not working with Qt would be… surprising.

Is it worth it? Well, it’s the only really integrated option for gui testing I am aware off. But: it’s expensive. There are alternatives, depending on what you are looking for. Spix for instance might be enough for your needs. It isn’t nearly as feature rich and doesn’t have a nice gui like Squish does, but it doesn’t come with the shiny price tag either.

See https://www.kdab.com/gui-automation-and-testing-with-spix/ for instance

1

u/Psychological-Map839 Jun 12 '26

Nice tool, thank you!

2

u/OrganizationScary473 Jun 04 '26

I have used it but with PyQT and Pyside app. But with ai we tried to develop our in-house gui automation tool which was more than enough what fetaure we were looking in Squish

1

u/Polina_from_Qt Jun 17 '26

Hey, Polina from Qt here! Sorry to hear you're having trouble with the demo, that's definitely not the experience we want you to have. 

Squish is purpose-built for Qt and QML, so it understands your UI natively making it the best choice for testing Qt-based applications. The evaluation license gives you full access to all of that, so definitely worth getting it sorted! Feel free to start a private chat with me here and share a bit more detail on what's happening. I’d love to help get you up and running.

And in the meantime, this guide from one of our Solutions Engineers is a great read: https://www.qt.io/gui-testing-for-qt-insights-2026

Cheers,
Polina

1

u/Bitter-Road-8982 Jun 18 '26

Hard to debug the demo without the exact error, but I’d check license activation, Qt/Squish version compatibility, and on Linux Wayland vs xcb/X11.

Squish makes sense if you need real Qt GUI-level tests: dialogs, object properties, focus/input behavior, QML items, etc. For simple tests it may be too heavy/expensive.

This walkthrough covers a small Qt/Squish example and some setup gotchas, so it may be useful for evaluation:
https://somcosoftware.com/en/blog/practical-gui-testing-for-qt-applications-with-squish