MuukTest Alternatives: MuukTest vs QA Wolf vs Rainforest QA

When startups are looking for a platform-enabled, done-for-you service to automate their end-to-end tests, MuukTest, QA Wolf, and Rainforest QA are often the top contenders.

In this piece, we’ll compare MuukTest vs. QA Wolf vs. Rainforest QA in terms of their service offerings, pricing, testing capabilities, velocity, and transparency.

SERVICES OVERVIEW
Platform-enabled service	✅	✅	✅
Handles all automated test writing and maintenance	✅	✅	✅
Service providers are dedicated to your account	✅	?	✅
Service providers communicate effectively	?	✅	✅
Massively parallel test execution	✅	✅	✅
CI/CD integration	✅	✅	✅
Detailed test results for fast debugging	✅	✅	✅
Outstanding customer support	✅	✅	✅
PRICING
Pricing model	Based on how many tests you have	Based on how many tests you have	Based on how much testing you want to do
Scaling up is cost effective	?	❌	✅
Unlimited test environments	?	❌	✅
60-day money-back guarantee	❌﹡	❌	✅
TESTING CAPABILITIES
Web app testing	✅	✅	✅
Native mobile app testing	✅	✅﹡	❌
Tests the actual user experience, not just the DOM	❌	❌	✅
Test anything on a macOS or Windows screen, not just the browser	❌	❌	✅
Keep your tests forever in Playwright	✅	✅	✅
VELOCITY
Multiple fallback methods to avoid test brittleness	❌	❌	✅
Generative AI automatically updates broken tests	?	?	✅
No-code for faster test creating and maintenance	❌	❌	✅
TRANSPARENCY
Anyone can interpret and update tests, no technical skills needed	❌	❌	✅

Services, compared

In terms of their core service offerings, MuukTest, QA Wolf, and Rainforest QA are quite similar:

• Done-for-you services: They’re all automated testing services that can handle all of your end-to-end (E2E) test writing and maintenance within their respective platforms.
• Parallel test execution: They all offer parallel execution of tests suites on their respective cloud infrastructures to return test results in just a few minutes.
• CI/CD and other integrations: In addition to integrating their respective tests into CI/CD pipelines, each of the platforms also feature Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations to provide automated test updates.
• Detailed test results: All three services offer detailed test results. For example, Rainforest test results include video recordings, HTTP logs, browser logs, repro steps, and AI-generated explanations of test failures.
• Excellent customer service: They’re all well-reviewed on sites like G2 for having excellent service and customer support.

But there are two areas to keep your eye on if you’re considering these three solutions:

Unlike MuukTest and Rainforest, QA Wolf doesn’t dedicate service providers to your account

Both MuukTest and Rainforest QA assign dedicated resources to your account. (MuukTest contributors are called “QA Architects” and Rainforest contributors are “Test Managers.”) All Rainforest QA Test Managers have been with us since at least 2017, undergo regular training and evaluations, and have been consistently well-reviewed by customers.

When you get experienced, dedicated resources, you can have more confidence that the people working on your tests are reliable and are familiar with your product and priorities. Which means they can deliver their work more efficiently and effectively.

On the other hand, it’s unclear if QA Wolf engineers work on one or several accounts at a time. It also appears from their hiring patterns that they might subcontract some work. This is likely a compromise they’ve had to make to deliver on their unique “24-hour maintenance” commitment.

Rainforest and QA Wolf are set up to communicate effectively with your team, but maybe not MuukTest

With both QA Wolf and Rainforest QA, the people who write and maintain your tests join you in a shared Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. Rainforest Test Managers can also join other comms or project tools like Jira, Asana, or Linear, depending on your team’s preference.

When you want to update test coverage, you just send a note and/or a video to your Rainforest Test Managers or QA Wolf engineers. They also monitor your test failures, notifying you of suspected bugs and proactively updating the tests that need it.

Rainforest QA Test Managers all speak English and work in or near your timezone to avoid communication hassles.

When you work with MuukTest, it’s not clear what other modes of communication are available to you aside from weekly calls. It’s worth asking them what kind of access you’ll have to the personnel working on your tests.

Plus, at least a couple of MuukTest customers on G2 specifically call out struggles with language barriers, which is a typical complaint with conventional QA outsourcing.

Pricing, compared

Both MuukTest and QA Wolf charge based on how many tests are in your suite. (Notably, MuukTest only charges for tests that are “actively running.” I.e., if you have tests you never use, you presumably won’t be charged for those.)

While they have the same pricing model, QA Wolf is much more expensive than MuukTest.

MuukTest starts at $4k per month for up to 300 tests.

Meanwhile, QA Wolf starts at $8K per month for only 200 tests, paid as part of an annual contract.

In fact, reviews of on G2 show that pricing is the most-cited thing their customers dislike about QA Wolf. 

Unlike QA Wolf, Rainforest and MuukTest don’t charge integration fees

On top of their expensive service charges, QA Wolf charges an “integration fee” equal to the cost of one month of service (i.e., starting at $8K).

Rainforest doesn’t charge any setup or integration fees, and it doesn’t look like MuukTest does, either. (But be sure to ask.)

Rainforest starts at a lower annual price than MuukTest and QA Wolf

The annual prices for MuukTest and QA Wolf start at $48k and $104k, respectively. (Though we’ve heard from customers that QA Wolf plans are sometimes offered as low as $72k with first-year discounts.)

Rainforest plans start at less than $30k, which is about a quarter of the all-in cost of hiring an experienced QA engineer in the U.S. Instead of having an intro plan with a painfully high price point, we try to right-size a plan that fits your specific scenario. That means, for example, if you’ve got a newer product with fewer QA demands, you won’t have to pay for things you don’t yet need.

Rainforest gives you an unlimited number of tests, unlike MuukTest and QA Wolf

Customers run into challenges with MuukTest and QA Wolf’s pricing model, which is based on how many tests they manage in your suite.

Having a limited number of tests means, sooner or later, you’ll have to make painful tradeoffs as your app grows. You’ll either have to remove coverage from one feature to give to another — in which case you’re sacrificing confidence in product quality — or you’ll have to spend more money to increase your allowed number of tests. 

This pay-per-test approach is especially challenging if your agile team releases frequent changes. How do you know the test coverage you need this week will be the same coverage you need next week? No one wants to spend more time or brain power than necessary on test coverage allocation. That’s not the best use of a software team’s time.

Instead, Rainforest prices its test automation service plans based on two things:

1. How much testing you want to do, based on how many test executions we project you’ll want to perform. Our team will work with you to make sure you have plenty of room to run — even as your test suite grows and you increase the frequency of your releases — so you don’t have to limit testing at the expense of your confidence in product quality.
2. How much help you’ll need from Test Manager personnel to handle test creation and maintenance, based on the planned size of your automated test suite. Again, our team will work with you to make sure you have more than enough resources.

In all Rainforest plans, there are no limitations on: 

• The number of your users who can access the platform.
• The number of tests in your suite (unlike MuukTest and QA Wolf).
• The number of tests you can run in parallel.
• The type of platforms or browsers you can run tests on. Our cloud of macOS and Windows virtual machines includes multiple versions of Chrome, Safari, Brave, Firefox, Edge, and IE.
• The number of environments you can add tests to (unlike QA Wolf, which appears to charge more for additional environments).

Rainforest makes it more economical to scale than MuukTest or QA Wolf and has a price cap

MuukTest and QA Wolf get progressively more expensive as you add tests to your suite — with no apparent price cap. They tout the ability to run an unlimited number of tests, but the catch is: you’re still limited by the number of tests that exist in your suite. When your app gets more complex and you need more tests, you’ll pay more.

From one of our sales conversations, here’s a quote from a QA Wolf customer who’s considering a switch to Rainforest QA:

“Our concerns are… we’re at the limit with QA Wolf. For our current plan, since they charge us per test, we don’t like how that scales. We could be paying 60k this year, 120k next year, 240k the following. It could be like that if our complexity grows. So, yeah, we don’t like that.”

VP Product and Engineering

Rainforest, on the other hand, does have a price cap.

For customers who operate at scale and want unlimited test runs, Rainforest offers a fixed-price contract with unlimited tests and test executions. And this price is lower than many of MuukTest and QA Wolf’s scaled plans.

Rainforest offers a 60-day money-back guarantee — MuukTest and especially QA Wolf aren’t nearly as generous

Rainforest wants to remove a chunk of the risk of selecting a new QA partner. Before you sign a contract with us, we’ll agree on success criteria for your first 60 days with us. If we don’t meet your criteria within 60 days, you can request a refund and we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.

MuukTest offers a 30-day pilot, in which you can get at least 50 tests up and running without entering a contract. If you’re not satisfied, you can keep the tests — but it seems like you’ll still owe them money. According to their website, pilot prices “start at $2,000,” which isn’t as good as a money-back guarantee, but is definitely less risky than what QA Wolf offers.

QA Wolf doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee. Instead, they offer a three-month pilot period, which starts at $32k. (A minimum of $8k per month plus a minimum $8k integration fee in the first month.) You’re not locked into a contract unless you’re happy with the pilot. But if you’re not happy, you’ve spent at least $32k and still don’t have a way to automate your tests.

Testing capabilities, compared

Rainforest gives you confidence in the actual user experience

QA Wolf develops tests in Playwright, an open source framework released by Microsoft. MuukTest also creates test scripts that can run on Playwright, but they also support the Selenium and Cypress open source frameworks. 

The open-source frameworks used by MuukTest and QA Wolf don’t actually “see” or interact with the visual layer — or user interface (UI) — of your web app like your end users do. They interact with and evaluate the DOM code behind the scenes of your web app, like a computer would. 

Since the DOM is just a proxy for the front-end experience — and not a direct representation of it — open source test results don’t reflect what the experience of your users will be. They can’t give you full confidence in the effectiveness of your tests.

Here’s a simple example: Let’s say there’s a popup blocking a user’s button from view. The popup is preventing the user from interacting with the button, but a DOM-based test wouldn’t “see” the popup. It’d simply locate the identifier for the button in the code and assume the button was available for interaction. 

On the other hand, Rainforest uses a proprietary test automation framework that primarily evaluates and interacts with the actual UI of your application. (Though it can use the DOM as a fallback.) It performs true front-end testing, evaluating both the functionality and appearance of your app. So you can have confidence you’re protecting the user experience. 

In the case of the example above, a Rainforest UI test would find that the button wasn’t available on the screen (because it was obscured) — just like a real user would.

Rainforest can test anything on a macOS or Windows screen, unlike QA Wolf and MuukTest

Playwright is limited to testing DOM code, so QA Wolf tests are definitionally limited to testing things that happen within the browser window.

MuukTest can perform desktop application testing, so their testing isn’t limited to just the browser. But the open-source frameworks they use don’t allow them to test anything that appears on the screen.

Because Rainforest’s automation framework takes a visual-first approach, it can test anything that appears on the screen of one of our macOS or Windows virtual machines (VMs). For example, you can test downloading a file from the web, double-clicking the file on the desktop to open it, and then confirming the contents or behavior of the file. We also have customers who, for example, test browser extensions where they live in the browser toolbar.

Velocity, compared

Most startups and other growth-focused companies want to ship code — the faster and more frequently, the better.

In the world of test automation, the biggest challenge to velocity is the cost of test automation maintenance. 

In short, the more changes you push to your app, the more someone will need to work to update your automated tests to reflect the latest, intended version of your app. Until those outdated tests are fixed, they’ll continue to fail and reduce the usefulness of your test suite. 

The time-consuming work to update these tests is called maintenance. As we discussed above, test maintenance requires either (1) blocking your release pipeline until all tests pass or (2) ignoring failing tests to unblock the release, which puts product quality at risk.

Rainforest has been designed to reduce or remove the costs of test maintenance to align itself with the goal of high shipping velocity. 

Test creation and maintenance is up to 3x faster in Rainforest’s no-code platform vs. using open source frameworks (like MuukTest and QA Wolf do)

Rainforest’s Test Managers work in Rainforest’s intuitive, no-code platform. That means they can create and update tests up to 3x faster than QA engineers working in an open source framework (like the ones MuukTest and QA Wolf use).

This is substantiated by a survey of 625 software developers and engineering leaders, which shows that software teams using a no-code solution like Rainforest spend much less time on test creation and maintenance than teams using open source.

See the difference for yourself in this video, which shows the same test script being created in Rainforest and in Playwright:

Unlike MuukTest and QA Wolf, Rainforest uses multiple methods to avoid test brittleness

In most automated testing tools and frameworks, a small change to an element in your app — like a button, text label, or link — can break the relevant tests. A test relying on a single identifier or “locator” for the element can fail when it can no longer find a match for that identifier.

Automated tests that frequently fail due to minor changes have a name: “brittle tests.” Brittle tests result in annoyingly recurrent test failure investigations and maintenance.

MuukTest claims to have an “auto-healing” feature to avoid brittle tests, but the fact is that their technology relies on trying to identify different, valid locators in the behind-the-scenes DOM code for each app element. If the code for a button in your app, for example, changes too much, then auto-healing goes right out the window.

Tests in Rainforest are less brittle because they rely on three different types of identifiers to locate elements in your web application. These include visual appearance, an automatically-identified DOM locator, and an element description automatically generated by our AI. A change in any one of these identifiers won’t break your test.

Rainforest uses a patent-pending generative AI approach to automatically update tests, reducing the need for maintenance

When you make intended changes to your web app’s appearance or functionality, generative AI can often automatically update — or “heal” — the relevant test steps so time-consuming, human-powered test maintenance is completely avoided.

Rainforest’s AI

Unlike other off-the-shelf AI models, Rainforest’s AI is optimized specifically for QA. With a novel, patent-pending approach, we make our AI more reliable
and better at end-to-end testing.

Any changes Rainforest’s AI makes to your tests are completely transparent, are checked by humans, and you have final control over how your tests work — you can give directions to your Test Manager or make changes in the no-code platform yourself.

Get a quick overview of Rainforest’s AI-powered self-healing capabilities in this 45-second video (or check out an in-depth, 6-minute demo or ask us for a personal demo):

Between the no-code tooling and the ways we’ve implemented AI, Rainforest Test Managers can keep your test suite up to date while minimizing bottlenecks to your release process.

MuukTest’s AI

MuukTest’s website claims their platform is “AI-powered,” but they don’t provide any specific details. What, exactly, does their AI do and how might it improve test creation and maintenance?

It’s unclear if they’ve actually deployed technology that improves the velocity of their process, or if it’s mainly marketing hype. If you’re speaking with them, be sure to ask for an explanation and demo.

QA Wolf’s AI

In the space of five months, QA Wolf went from being loudly skeptical of AI in testing to claiming they have an “AI-native approach”:

In March of 2024, exactly two weeks after Rainforest announced its generative AI features, QA Wolf published a blog post claiming “maybe… eventually” AI could be trusted to handle test maintenance.

But just five months later — the day it announced Series B funding — QA Wolf updated its home page to claim an “AI-native approach.”

Given their flip-flop, it’s unclear how much of QA Wolf’s claims about its AI are just marketing hype for investors and customers. The only way to know if it might actually help them deliver your test updates more quickly is to ask to see it in action.

Transparency, compared

“Transparency” refers to how easy it is (or isn’t) for anyone from your team to quickly review, validate, and even update your test coverage in each of the three platforms.

Tl;dr: The no-code tests in Rainforest’s intuitive platform are completely transparent. Meanwhile, MuukTest’s platform is more difficult to use and requires knowledge of JavaScript when you want to review your tests. And QA Wolf requires that you know the Playwright framework and the relevant programming language if you hope to understand what your tests are doing.

Anyone can quickly confirm or change tests in Rainforest, no technical skills required

All of Rainforest’s no-code test scripts are in plain English, which means anyone on your team can quickly interpret them. There are no black boxes.

Plus, if you don’t want to wait a few extra minutes to communicate a change request to your Test Managers, anyone on your team can jump into Rainforest’s intuitive platform and quickly create or update tests without any training. The platform is that easy to use. (Hear it directly from our customers.)

Compare this to MuukTest platform, in which the most basic steps — like “click” or “input” — are displayed in no-code, but any steps even slightly more complicated are captured and displayed in JavaScript. Only someone with the right technical skills will be able to review and confirm test coverage.

Plus, even the no-code aspects of MuukTest’s test scripts obscure what a test is actually doing. In the no-code parts of a MuukTest script, you can see the action the test is taking — like clicking a button or executing JavaScript — but you can’t see important details like what element in your app is being acted upon.

In fact, some of the most consistent customer complaints about MuukTest are about challenges with using the platform and the readability of test scripts.

With QA Wolf, if you want to confirm the testing workflows they’ve created are doing what they’re supposed to, you’ll need to “speak” the programming language (e.g., JavaScript or Python) that their hired QA engineers have used in Playwright. Anyone without the necessary technical skills just has to hope and trust. 

Summarizing the contenders

Unless yours is the rare software team that needs QA engineers to be available 24 hours per day to perform test maintenance, QA Wolf’s expensive plans put it out of consideration for many startups. Especially in light of the compelling and less-expensive offerings available from MuukTest and Rainforest QA.

MuukTest will be the obvious choice if you need to perform automated testing on native mobile apps, since Rainforest is focused on testing for web applications.

But if you’re looking to automate testing for a web application (1) at a competitive price, (2) at the highest velocity, and (3) with the confidence that your tests are actually protecting the user experience (not just the DOM), then Rainforest QA is uniquely positioned to help you.