Which device clouds can actually run in your data centre?

Some teams can send an unreleased build to a third party's cloud, and most do. Some teams cannot — a bank whose regulator localises payment data, a broadcaster whose unreleased app is the product, a health app under a data-protection regime. For those teams the useful question isn't "which device cloud is best," it's the much narrower "which one can run inside our own network at all."

That field is far smaller than the field of vendors. Here is where the major device clouds stand, as of mid-2026, according to each vendor's own documentation. We've linked every source; check them, because these pages change.

What "on-prem" turns out to mean

The word does a lot of quiet work, so it helps to separate three different things vendors call by similar names:

• Public cloud — shared devices in the vendor's data centre.
• Private / dedicated cloud — devices reserved to you, still in the vendor's data centre.
• On-premises — the devices, and ideally the control plane and storage, inside your network.

Most "private" offerings are the middle one. The third is the one a security review actually asks for, and it is rare.

The survey

Vendor	Runs inside your network?	What they offer
BrowserStack	No	"Custom Device Lab" (Enterprise) — dedicated devices, hosted in BrowserStack's own data centres. Its page advertised "on-premises" wording in Nov 2025 that is no longer present.
Sauce Labs	No	"Private Devices" — a dedicated pool "only accessible to members of your organization," on the Sauce-hosted Real Device Cloud.
AWS Device Farm	No	Private devices are "deployed on your behalf in an Amazon data center… exclusive to your AWS account," available in us-west-2 only.
TestMu AI (ex-LambdaTest)	No	No customer-premises deployment documented.
Firebase Test Lab	No	A CI test-execution service; no private or on-prem option.
Kobiton	Contact sales	On-prem / dedicated devices appear only under the Enterprise tier ("Let's Talk"); self-serve tiers are public cloud.
pCloudy	Yes	"Lab in a Box" — the real-device cloud running inside your data centre, air-gapped setups included (vendor-stated).
HeadSpin	Claims to	Markets "the industry's only enterprise-grade on-premise setup."

Read the pattern rather than any single row: five of the eight cannot run inside your network at all. For most of the market, "private" means a reserved shelf in someone else's building — which is a fine thing, and not the thing a data-residency requirement is asking for.

Two honest notes

HeadSpin's superlative is contestable. They market "the industry's only enterprise-grade on-premise setup." By this same survey, pCloudy offers an on-premise appliance, Kobiton offers on-prem under Enterprise, and RobusTest runs the full stack on your premises — so "only" is a strong word. We'd quote the claim and let you weigh it, rather than characterise it.

"On-prem" and "air-gapped" are not the same. On-prem means the gear is in your building. Air-gapped means it also has no path to the internet — which breaks anything that needs to phone home (a licence check, an email relay, a push service). If your requirement is the stricter one, ask each vendor specifically, because a page that says "on-premise" rarely says "and it runs disconnected."

Where we sit

We'll be direct about our own position, since this is our blog: RobusTest runs the entire lab — control plane, devices, and storage — inside the customer's network, air-gap included. That's the bet the rest of the site is about, and the honest reason this survey exists is that we kept meeting teams who assumed it wasn't an option, because the loudest vendors in the category can't offer it.

If you're weighing this, the useful exercise is not a feature grid. It's one question put to each vendor in writing: does the device, the control plane, and the test data stay inside our network — and does it work with no path out? The answers narrow the field fast.