The best QA Wolf alternatives in 2024

In this piece, we’ll make the case that Rainforest QA is the best of the QA Wolf alternatives. If you’re considering a platform-enabled test automation service like QA Wolf, you should also consider Rainforest QA.

(You can also jump to the last section to see other QA Wolf competitors.)

How can we claim Rainforest is the best of the bunch? Here’s the short version:

Rainforest shares some key strengths with QA Wolf, but adds important benefits around price, speed of execution, testing capabilities, and transparency.

Rainforest QA vs. QA Wolf

Here’s a quick overview of how Rainforest and QA Wolf compare. Read on for more details.

SERVICES OVERVIEW
Platform-enabled service	✅	✅
Handles all automated test writing and maintenance	✅	✅
Service providers join you in Slack or Teams	✅	✅
Massively parallel test execution	✅	✅
CI/CD integration	✅	✅
Detailed test results for fast debugging	✅	✅
Outstanding customer support	✅	✅
PRICING
Pricing model	Based on how much testing you want to do	Based on how many tests you have
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	✅	❌

What do Rainforest and QA Wolf have in common?

Rainforest and QA Wolf are similar in a number of notable ways. 

Platform-enabled services

Both Rainforest and QA Wolf are platform-enabled test automation services. This means the service providers at each company work within their respective testing platforms to write and maintain automated tests and analyze test results.

In both cases, you or your team members can access the platform if you’d like to review test coverage or investigate test failures. (Though you can do even more on the Rainforest all-in-one platform — more on that, below.)

Handles all automated test writing and maintenance

With both solutions, the people who write and maintain your tests join your team in a shared Slack or Teams channel for real-time communication. (Rainforest Test Managers can also join other comms or project tools like Jira or Linear, depending on your team’s preference.)

When you want to add or update test coverage, you can just send a note and/or a video to your Rainforest Test Managers/QA Wolf engineers.

These personnel also monitor your test failures, notifying you of suspected bugs and proactively updating the tests that need it.

Rainforest dedicates one or more Test Managers to your account. They deeply learn your product and priorities so they can work more efficiently and effectively for you. All Test Managers have been with us since at least 2017, undergo regular training and evaluations, and have consistently well-reviewed by customers.

It’s unclear if QA Wolf engineers work on one or several accounts at a time, or if any of their contributors are subcontractors.

Designed for testing web apps

Both Rainforest and QA Wolf are automation solutions for teams who want to test web-based desktop and/or mobile applications. (Though Rainforest’s web testing capabilities are more flexible. More on that, below.) They’re ideal for SaaS startups and other businesses that need web testing.

Neither service offers automated software testing for native mobile apps. (Update: As of late July, 2024, QA Wolf has started a waitlist for native mobile app testing services.)

Massively-parallel test execution

Both test automation platforms include cloud-based infrastructures that allow you to execute your tests massively in parallel. That means you can get test results back in just a few minutes. (And you don’t need to pay extra for a third-party test grid like BrowserStack or LambdaTest.) 

CI/CD integrations

Both Rainforest and QA Wolf support integrating your tests into a CI/CD pipeline. QA Wolf has an SDK and an API, while Rainforest has an API, a CLI, a GitHub Action, and a CircleCI Orb.

Exports to ticketing apps like Jira

When a Rainforest Test Manager or QA Wolf engineer identifies a suspected bug, they can submit it to your preferred bug tracking tool. 

Rainforest even includes a Jira integration so bugs can be automatically submitted directly to Jira. Debugging details include repro steps, a video recording, HTTP logs, and browser logs.

Outstanding customer support

Both companies have glowing reviews around customer support and customer experience. 

With Rainforest, every account gets a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) who’s not only an expert in the Rainforest platform, but also an experienced QA strategist. In addition to providing support, they can help your team define test plans, improve testing processes, and implement best practices. 

Big difference #1: Pricing

If you check out reviews of QA Wolf on G2, you’ll find that pricing is the most-cited thing customers dislike about QA Wolf. 

QA Wolf’s pricing model limits the number of tests you can have

Rainforest and QA Wolf both offer annual contracts. But the similarities effectively end there. 

While Rainforest charges based on the amount of testing you want to do, QA Wolf charges based on the number of tests in your suite. Their prices start at $8k per month for 200 tests, which isn’t going to be sufficient test coverage for many teams.

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.

Rainforest pricing doesn’t limit the number of tests

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 many Test Manager personnel you’ll need 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 tests in your suite (unlike QA Wolf).
• The amount of maintenance work done to keep your tests up to date.
• The number of environments you can add tests to (unlike QA Wolf).
• 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 tests you can run in parallel.
• The number of your users who can access the platform.

Scaling with QA Wolf is expensive

The challenges around test coverage allocation would be easy to solve if QA Wolf made it affordable to scale up, but it seems that’s not the case. 

We can only speak to what we’ve been told by QA Wolf customers and by teams who have been pitched by QA Wolf. But the pricing complaints that appear across QA Wolf’s G2 reviews also show up across our conversations with teams shopping for a QA Wolf alternative.

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 makes it more economical to scale

QA Wolf gets progressively more expensive as you add tests to your suite — with no apparent price cap. QA Wolf might 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.

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

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

QA Wolf’s testing philosophy is more aligned with their financial incentives than your testing goals

You’ve probably seen QA Wolf’s advertisements touting that they can get you “80% test coverage in four months.”

There are at least a couple of inherent issues with that promise. 

• Four months would be fast for some companies and slow for others, depending on the size and complexity of their apps.
• 80 percent is arbitrary — some companies don’t necessarily need that much coverage from functional tests like these. In fact, it’d be counter-productive. 

If less than 80 percent of your app represents critical end-user flows (i.e., flows you’d fix right away if they broke), then 80 percent test coverage is excessive and can actually undermine your release velocity or your confidence in quality. 

When you push a change to your app, some of your regression tests will invariably fail upon execution because they’re looking for an old version of your app and need to be updated. More test failures means more time is required to investigate the failures and bring the affected tests up to date. 

If you require all tests to be passing before a release (which is a best practice), then more test failures means more bottlenecks in your releases. If failing tests aren’t a blocker, then you’ll have less confidence in your product quality as the affected tests are out of commission. (When a test is marked as needing maintenance, QA Wolf prevents it from running so it doesn’t add “noise” to the test suite.)

In short, having excessive functional test coverage isn’t aligned with the velocity goals of most startups. Most teams want to ship, not wait on test suites to get updated, so the ideal is to aim for a “just right” amount of test coverage that balances velocity and confidence in quality. (Unit testing, of course, is the exception — you should have as much unit test coverage as possible.)

It’s interesting that emphasizing getting a lot of test coverage — 80%, whether you need it or not — isn’t aligned with your desire to ship fast and with confidence. But it is aligned with QA Wolf’s financial incentive for you to have as many tests as possible.

Relatedly, QA Wolf also keeps their tests very short, by design. (Check out their “AAA” approach.) More like integration tests than end-to-end tests. While we agree that shorter tests are better than long tests (within reason), it’s also interesting that you’d need more short tests to do what a single longer one could. 

We’re not suggesting the QA Wolf team has any underhanded intentions. They could have simply landed on their ad slogan because it’s quite catchy! And there are merits to their adoption of short tests.

But it does highlight that it’s always useful to consider incentives and how much they’re aligned in your favor.

QA Wolf charges a steep “integration fee”

QA Wolf charges an integration fee equal to the prorated one-month cost of their service, which starts at $8k. Payment for the integration fee is due in the first month of service.

It’s unclear what services are provided in exchange for this fee, but the high cost for “integration” suggests that integrating QA Wolf tests into a release process isn’t particularly straightforward.

While some reviewers of QA Wolf on G2 say their implementations went smoothly, a number of others talk about the challenges they faced.

It shouldn’t be complicated to integrate automated tests into a CI/CD pipeline. You can quickly add Rainforest tests to any CI/CD pipeline using our API, CLI, GitHub Action, or CircleCI Orb. We’ve got extensive documentation, and every customer gets a dedicated Customer Success Manager to provide guidance and training on the platform, implementation, and QA best practices.

QA Wolf appears to charge more for additional test environments. Rainforest doesn’t.

If you’re speaking with QA Wolf and you want to run your end-to-end test suite across different environments, ask them if there are any limitations or additional costs.

Rainforest lets you use as many test environments as you want at no additional charge.

Rainforest offers a 60-day money-back guarantee

Before you sign a contract with Rainforest, 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.

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.) The benefit of the pilot is that you don’t get locked into a contract unless you’re happy with their performance over those three months. But if you’re not happy, you’re down at least $32k and still don’t have an automation solution.

Big difference #2: Testing capabilities

Rainforest gives you confidence in the actual user experience

QA Wolf develops tests in Playwright, an open source framework released by Microsoft. 

Playwright and other open-source frameworks (like Cypress and Selenium) 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 merely a proxy for the front-end experience — and not a direct and reliable representation of it — Playwright test results don’t reflect what the experience of your users will be. 

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 (QA Wolf is limited to the browser)

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

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. 

You own your Rainforest tests, can export them to Playwright

Even though we had to build a proprietary framework to give Rainforest these unique testing capabilities, you can still take your Rainforest tests with you.

If for some reason you ever leave Rainforest, we can export your Rainforest tests to a Playwright scaffolding. A quality assurance engineer (from QA Wolf or otherwise) can then take them over.

Big difference #3: Velocity

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. 

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. (In the case of Playwright tests from QA Wolf, they’d be looking for identifiers in the behind-the-scenes DOM code.)

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.

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 generative AI 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 use over ten years
of manual testing data from our previous crowd testing business to 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):

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.

Test maintenance is faster in Rainforest’s no-code platform vs. using open source frameworks like Playwright

Rainforest’s Test Managers work in Rainforest’s intuitive, no-code platform. That means they can create and update tests faster than QA engineers working in an open source framework like Playwright.

This is according to data we captured in a market research survey of 112 startup software development teams in the U.S. and Canada.

Time required to maintain automated tests
Open source vs. no-code

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.

Big difference #4: No black boxes

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

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. 

On the other hand, all of Rainforest’s no-code test scripts are in plain English, which empowers anyone from 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, you or anyone on your team can jump into Rainforest’s intuitive platform and quickly create or update tests without any training. The platform is that intuitive.

Other QA Wolf alternatives

If you’re still interested in other solutions to add to your consideration set, here are a few to check out.

• Muuk Test: Like QA Wolf, Muuk Test is a platform-enabled service that charges by the test. Unlike QA Wolf and Rainforest, they support automation of native mobile apps, so if that’s your scenario, they might be worth checking out. Reviewers on G2 mention a lack of parallel testing, limited integrations, and limited details about test runs.
• Test.io: Test.io crowdsources its QA contributors from a large, international community. It also offers test automation services. (Most of its reviews on G2 are about its manual testers.)
• Testlio: Like Test.io, Testlio offers both manual and automated testing services. Reviewers like Testlio’s customer service and flexibility, but mention it’s challenging getting testers up to speed on complex products and the Testlio interface can be challenging to use.