For software teams committed to using open-source test automation frameworks, LambdaTest is a solid one-stop shop for everything you need in the testing workflow. In this piece, we’ll give you some other options that also operate around open-source frameworks.
But if you’re looking to automate your manual tests and haven’t already invested in open source, you should know about the painful tradeoffs that come with using solutions like Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright. For example:
- Open-source testing frameworks aren’t really “free” — making use of them requires expensive technical personnel.
- The time-consuming maintenance of open-source tests tends to bottleneck the release process.
- Many developers hate having to do maintenance in these frameworks because it’s so tedious and distracts them from their first priority: shipping code.
Do you want to evaluate LambdaTest alternatives that require you to work with open-source frameworks, or do you want to use a test automation solution that helps you avoid those costs and pain points?
If it’s the latter, you should evaluate our solution, Rainforest QA. We’ll make a case that it’s the best alternative to LambdaTest in terms of services, testing capabilities, velocity, price, and transparency.
1. Rainforest QA
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SERVICES OVERVIEW | ||
Includes platform for managing tests and results | ||
Includes cloud infrastructure for running tests | ||
Service providers handle test creation & maintenance | ||
Service providers are dedicated to your account | ||
Service providers work in your time zone | ||
Service providers join you in Slack or Teams | ||
Integrations with JIRA, Slack, Teams | ||
CI/CD integration | ||
PRICING | ||
60-day money-back guarantee | ||
TESTING CAPABILITIES | ||
Web app testing | ||
Native mobile app testing | ||
Performs intelligent visual testing | ||
Automation can test anything on a macOS or Windows screen | ||
Exploratory testing | ||
Keep your tests forever in Playwright | ||
VELOCITY | ||
No-code for 3x faster test creation and maintenance | ||
Multiple fallback methods to avoid test brittleness | ||
Generative AI automatically updates broken tests | ||
Execute tests in parallel | ||
Detailed test results | ||
TRANSPARENCY | ||
Anyone can interpret and update tests |
Rainforest QA offers AI-accelerated test automation services via an intuitive, no-code platform. It allows you to get scalable test coverage for your web app(s), fast, starting at less than a quarter of the cost of hiring an experienced QA engineer.
Rainforest takes time-consuming test maintenance completely off your team’s plate, for a much lower all-in cost
At first blush, LamdaTest’s prices might make it look more affordable than Rainforest.
But LambaTest only supports managing and executing tests from open-source frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and Puppeteer. You’ll need to pay someone to create and maintain your open-source test scripts.
You could have your current software developers spend a significant chunk of their time managing your end-to-end (E2E) tests. But you shouldn’t underestimate how much time and effort is needed to keep automated E2E test suites up to date. Digging around in the code of open-source tests is both tedious and time-consuming.
In a survey of over 600 software developers, we learned that 55% of software teams using open-source frameworks spend more than 20 hours per week on test creation and maintenance. The bigger your team (and, correspondingly, the more complex your application), the more time your team will spend on monotonous test maintenance.

So you’d probably prefer that your developers focus on shipping code. (And they’d probably prefer it, too.) As you know, their time tends to be quite expensive.
To manage your open-source tests, that leaves you with hiring an expensive QA engineer. Experienced QA engineers in the U.S. will cost you more than $100K per year — and that doesn’t even include the time, risk, and other costs of hiring.

Being keenly aware of how teams struggle with the burden of open-source test maintenance, we’ve designed Rainforest QA to take that burden completely off your team’s plate.
All starting at less than a quarter of the cost of hiring an experienced QA engineer.
We dedicate one or more experienced Test Managers to each one of our customers to handle all test creation, test maintenance, and triaging of test results. So our customers can keep their teams focused on building and shipping product.
Our Test Managers have all been with us since at least 2017 and have been consistently well-reviewed by other customers. They work in or near your time zone, and embed in your preferred comms tools, whether Slack, Microsoft Teams, JIRA, or whatever. And they deeply learn your product and priorities. Our customers say they feel like part of the team.
When a test needs to be written or updated, you simply send them a written message and/or video — without the worry of having to deal with the communication and competence issues associated with typical QA outsourcers.
LambdaTest offers optional professional services to help you with test creation and/or maintenance, but it’s unclear how experienced the service providers are, how well they integrate with your team, and how much they cost.
Rainforest offers a 60-day money-back guarantee
In addition to our highly-competitive pricing, we offer a unique money-back guarantee.
When you sign up for Rainforest, we’ll work with you to define success criteria for our first 60 days of working together. If we don’t hit those goals, you can ask for your money back, no questions asked.
🚀 See Rainforest in action with a live, perosnalized demo
Rainforest is more effective and reliable for web app testing
We’ve designed Rainforest QA to be very good at one thing: automated testing of web applications. By focusing on that one thing, we can do it very well.
If things like accessibility testing or native mobile app testing are critical to your business, LambdaTest will be a better fit. (They support open-source mobile testing frameworks like Appium, Espresso, and Flutter.)
In addition to running automated tests, both Rainforest and LambdaTest allow you to do live, interactive testing of web apps. Presumably LambdaTest allows you to interact with the real devices in their cloud. With Rainforest, you can interact with our cloud of Windows or macOS virtual machines (VMs). (Using VMs means we can do two things more quickly: provide “clean” machines in a default state to run your tests, and scale up our testing infrastructure as needed for our customers.)
Both platforms also offer “visual testing,” but only Rainforest uses an intelligent visual testing approach that can give you confidence that you’re protecting the experience of your users.
Open-source test frameworks primarily use the DOM (the behind-the-scenes code of a web app) to interact with and evaluate a web app. So LambdaTest primarily cares about the DOM, which is simply a proxy for the user experience. It adds visual testing as another testing option.
LambdaTest’s visual testing is based on pixel-for-pixel comparisons — if the pixels of the app under test don’t match the pixels in the baseline you’ve captured for your test, the test will fail.
You can control the sensitivity of the pixel-matching threshold in LambdaTest, but here’s the problem: there’s no such thing as an ideal threshold that’ll give you test results that protect the user experience without making your tests too brittle. Adjusting the sensitivity is mostly arbitrary.
- If your threshold is too high, your tests will fail on every little change, like if you’ve adjusted the shape or size of a button. These “false positive” test failures require time-consuming (and annoying) investigation, but don’t identify actual bugs.
- If your threshold is too low, you’ll have fewer false-positive test failures, but you’ll miss actual visual bugs, like, for example, a misspelled word in an image or a mis-aligned button.

While LambdaTest focuses on the DOM and offers hacky visual testing as a secondary option, Rainforest takes a visual-first approach. Rainforest automation evaluates and interacts with the visual layer of your web app, just like your users do. So Rainforest’s tests can give you more confidence that you’re protecting the user experience.
Instead of using the unreliable pixel-matching approach, Rainforest leverages machine learning to reach conclusions similar to those of a human tester. If a visual change to your app is so minor that a human tester wouldn’t notice or care, Rainforest will ignore it (i.e., Rainforest will pass the relevant test).
Our unique visual-first approach also means your automated Rainforest tests can test anything on a Windows or macOS screen. (Contrast this to open-source frameworks, which are limited to testing whatever appears in a browser window.) So, for example, you can easily test a browser extension or confirm a downloaded file’s contents.

Get and maintain test coverage up to 3x faster with Rainforest QA compared to using open source
There are two ways in which Rainforest and LambdaTest help maximize shipping velocity.
- Both LambdaTest and Rainforest allow you to execute your tests in parallel, which is important for shipping velocity. But it’s not clear how much more than 25 tests LambdaTest allows you to run at a time. Meanwhile, all plans on Rainforest allow you to run hundreds of tests in parallel.
- Like LambdaTest, Rainforest also helps speed up the debugging process with detailed test results including video recordings, repro steps, console logs, and HTTP logs.
But test execution and debugging aren’t the only potential bottlenecks to velocity presented by automated testing. As we’ve established, test creation and maintenance can be quite time-consuming tasks, particularly for teams using open-source frameworks like those underlying LambdaTest.
Using both AI and an user-friendly, no-code approach, Rainforest QA has been designed from the ground up to minimize the time your team has to spend waiting for test maintenance. So automated testing presents fewer bottlenecks and you can ship more code, faster.
According to our survey of 625 software developers, Rainforest QA Test Managers using our no-code platform can create and maintain automated tests up to 3x faster than QA engineers using an open-source framework.

To see this in action, check out this side-by-side comparison of Rainforest QA and Playwright. It shows the exact same test steps — creating a login flow for Wikipedia — being created in both frameworks.
Using Rainforest’s no-code is already much faster than working with an open-source framework. We also use generative AI in various ways to make the entire testing workflow more efficient.
For example, when you make intended changes to your app, Rainforest’s AI — which uses a novel, patent-pending approach to make it more reliable — can often automatically update (i.e., “heal”) your tests, so human-powered test maintenance time is completely avoided. (Any changes the AI makes are double-checked by your Test Managers and are completely transparent to you.)
LambdaTest has AI, too (“KaneAI”), but today it doesn’t help with test maintenance. It simply allows you to create test steps based on natural language prompts — which is something that Rainforest’s AI can do, too.
With Rainforest’s no-code tests, there are no black boxes — unlike with open-source tests
When your team uses open source for automated testing, only the people with the necessary technical skills can interpret — let alone modify — the tests protecting your app.
Because Rainforest’s no-code test scripts are written in plain English, anyone on the team can interpret and even update them without any training. You have full transparency into your test coverage.

2. BrowserStack
BrowserStack is a main competitor to LambdaTest if you’re married to the idea of using open-source automation frameworks.
BrowserStack is similar to LambdaTest in that it offers a “testing grid” of real devices, plus a set of tools for the automated testing workflow, including visual testing, test management, and more. With both solutions, you can automate testing of web apps and native mobile apps.
Unlike LambdaTest, BrowserStack also offers a low-code solution, though it’s not simple enough for anyone to use. If you need to create more than simple test flows, you’ll still need to know how to code (in JavaScript).
BrowserStack has more real devices in its cloud (>20K vs. >5K for LambdaTest), but it also tends to be more expensive, especially if you want to execute your automated tests in parallel.
3. Sauce Labs
SauceLabs is a direct competitor to LambdaTest and BrowserStack for teams committed to using open-source frameworks.
While BrowserStack started its life as a solution for teams who needed access to testing infrastructure, SauceLabs has always been an automated testing platform. By some measures, it’s stronger in automated testing capabilities.
4. QA Wolf
If you’re committed to using open source, but we’ve convinced you that you don’t want your team spending its time on test creation and maintenance: QA Wolf is another test automation services provider that can take these tasks off your plate.
QA Wolf works exclusively with Playwright and even offers 24-hour coverage when you need test maintenance (if that matters to you). The main downside with QA Wolf is that they’re widely considered quite expensive, and their pricing scales up very fast as your needs increase. Learn more about QA Wolf.
5. Testlio
If you want to outsource automated test creation and maintenance, Testlio can recruit professionals from their large “crowd” of QA personnel. But Testlio has historically focused on providing headcount for manual QA testing, so test automation services are relatively new to them. Learn more about Testlio.