If you’re looking for Test IO alternatives, you’re likely looking for solutions that’ll help you scale up your software team’s QA capabilities.
Test IO (sometimes referred to as “Test.io”) is a crowd testing service that sources QA professionals from its large “crowd” of independent contractors, whether you need extra hands for manual testing or QA engineers for automating tests.
As you’re considering alternatives to Test IO, you should be aware of some of Test IO’s shortcomings, so you can see how other services might meet your specific needs more effectively.
For example, Test IO:
- Only uses open source frameworks for test automation, which are notoriously slow to work with and frequently bottleneck releases.
- Has only offered test automation services since 2022 — they’re better known for their crowdsourced manual testing services.
- Only offers an AI (“Alita”) to assist with test creation — Alita with test maintenance, which is where most time is spent keeping test suites up to date.
- Doesn’t include test infrastructure on which to run your tests, so you have to procure and manage the infrastructure yourself.
- Won’t save you from having to hire expensive QA engineers.
- Doesn’t offer any financial guarantees or protection if they don’t meet your expectations.
1. Rainforest QA
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SERVICES OVERVIEW | ||
Focused on test automation | ||
Includes platform for managing tests and results | ||
Includes infrastructure for running tests | ||
Service providers are dedicated to your account | ||
Services 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 test automation | ||
Native mobile app test automation | ||
Exploratory testing | ||
Automation tests the actual user experience, not just the DOM | ||
Automation can test anything on a macOS or Windows screen | ||
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 | ||
Detailed test results | ||
TRANSPARENCY | ||
Anyone can interpret and update tests |
Talk to us about scheduling a personalized demo of Rainforest QA
Rainforest QA is an AI-accelerated test automation service that includes access to an all-in-one, no-code testing platform. As add-on features, Rainforest offers exploratory testing and even manual testing from its own crowd.
It’s similar to Test IO in that they both offer comprehensive test coverage between automated and manual tests. But Rainforest delivers without any of Test IO’s shortcomings noted above.
Rainforest is designed to avoid common complaints about QA outsourcing
Rainforest’s service providers — we call them Test Managers — have all been with us since 2017 and have been highly-reviewed by other Rainforest customers. We dedicate one or more Test Managers to each customer’s account.
Rainforest Test Managers work in your time zone, speak fluent English, and join your preferred comms tools (like Slack and JIRA) so they can embed in your workflows and deeply learn your product and priorities.
By designing our services in this way, our customers avoid the communication and quality-of-service issues that plague traditional QA outsourcers. In fact, our customers often say their Test Managers feel like part of the team.

It’s unclear if Test IO assigns anyone to your account and to what extent (if any) they commit to providing QA engineers who are available in your time zone or your workflow tools. If you’re speaking with Test IO, you should definitely ask them.
Rainforest is more effective and reliable for web app testing
Rainforest is specifically optimized for web app test automation. By focusing on this one thing, we can excel at it. We’ll illustrate this point in the following sections.
On the other hand, Test IO added test automation as a supplementary service in 2022. They don’t focus on automated testing, but rather offer it as one of several services available from their crowd, which has historically focused on manual testing.
Given our focus on web apps, Rainforest doesn’t do test automation for native mobile apps. For mobile app testing, Test IO is a better option. Their contracted QA engineers can work with open-source frameworks like Appium to automate test cases for Android and iOS apps.
Rainforest automation tests the actual user experience, unlike the open-source frameworks used by Test IO
When QA engineers sourced by Test IO automate your end-to-end tests, they use open-source frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright.
Unfortunately, open-source testing frameworks don’t test the actual user experience of your app. Instead, they test the “DOM” (the behind-the-scenes code of a web application’s UI), which is merely a proxy for the user experience.
While Rainforest’s automation can use the DOM as a secondary method to identify elements in your app, it primarily takes a visual approach. It evaluates and interacts with the visual layer of your application, just like your users do. That’s how Rainforest’s automated tests can give you confidence you’re protecting the experience of your users.
This visual-first approach also means Rainforest automation 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, Rainforest can test a browser extension or confirm a downloaded file’s contents.

Get test coverage 3x faster from Rainforest’s no-code test automation platform vs. Test IO engineers using open source
Whenever you update your app, you need to update the corresponding tests in your suite to keep them useful (and avoid annoying false-positive test failures).
This ongoing exercise is called test maintenance. Test maintenance with the open-source frameworks that Test IO engineers use is notorious for being painful and time consuming.
We hear this all the time from our customers and prospective customers.
”To be able to maintain automated tests, especially with a small dev team, just takes time.” – Software Engineering Lead
“In the past, we gave up on testing the front end with open source because it was too difficult to maintain and the tests were very often broken.” – Engineering Manager
“I also understand all the pain with developers maintaining the tests and the impact on velocity that it can have.” – Director of Engineering
In fact, we surveyed over 600 software developers and learned that 55% of software teams using open-source frameworks spend more than 20 hours per week on test creation and maintenance.
The more complex your app (and, correspondingly, the more developers you have), the more time will be needed for test maintenance.

This is why we designed Rainforest to have an intuitive, no-code framework, in which anyone can quickly create and maintain tests.

The same survey revealed that using an AI-accelerated, no-code platform like Rainforest is up to 3x faster than using open-source frameworks to deliver test coverage.

So our Test Managers can create and maintain automated tests for you, fast, without blocking your releases.
You can see for yourself in this video, which shows the same test being created side-by-side in Rainforest and in Playwright:
Rainforest uses patent-pending AI to avoid costly test maintenance
While Test IO’s AI “Alita” can help with test creation, it apparently can’t help where it really matters: test maintenance.
Rainforest’s novel, patent-pending AI helps with both test creation and with test maintenance.
Whenever you make relatively minor, intended changes to your app, the AI can automatically update (or “heal”) the relevant tests, completely avoiding the need for human intervention for maintenance.
Any changes Rainforest’s AI makes to your tests are double-checked by your Test Managers and are completely transparent to you. You have final control over how your tests work — you can direct your Test Manager to make changes or make changes yourself in the no-code testing platform, which is designed for ease of use.
In this 50-second video, get an overview of Rainforest’s AI-powered self-healing capabilities. (We also have in-depth, 6-minute demo.)
Rainforest helps you avoid having to hire expensive QA engineers
Because all Rainforest automated tests are no-code tests written in plain English, anyone on your team can interpret or even update the tests without any training or specialized skills. There are no black boxes, so there’s no need to hire a QA engineer to manage or interpret any of the tests we create and maintain for you.
How much does that save you? Well, Rainforest QA’s plans start at less than a quarter of the price of hiring an experienced QA engineer, which usually has a salary north of 100K.

With Test IO, only personnel who “speak” the right programming language can confirm your test coverage is doing what you want it to do.
Rainforest QA includes an all-in-one testing platform — Test IO expects you to procure your own testing infrastructure
Test IO promotes their capabilities around test management and reporting. But their platform is missing one of the most important parts of the testing workflow — the infrastructure on which to run your tests. You’ll have to procure the infrastructure yourself, likely through a testing grid like BrowserStack.
Rainforest’s platform, on the other hand, includes everything you need for the testing workflow:
- A no-code test framework for creating and maintaining tests
- An AI to accelerate test creation and maintenance
- Test management
- A scalable cloud of virtual Windows and macOS machines to run tests massively in parallel
- Detailed test results including video recordings, repro steps, HTTP logs, and browser logs
- Integrations for CI/CD platforms, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and JIRA
Rainforest offers a 60-day money-back guarantee
When you sign up for a plan with us, we’ll work with you to define success criteria for our first 60 days together. If we don’t hit those goals, you can ask for your money back, no questions asked.
As far as we know, no other test services provider — including Test IO — offers a guarantee like this.
2. Testlio
Testlio is very similar to Test IO in that they recruit QA specialists from their large crowd of contractors when you need to augment your QA headcount.
Testlio is also similar to Test IO in that it focuses on manual testing services, with automation a bit of an afterthought. Their automation services also exclusively use open-source testing frameworks, so they suffer the same lack of speed and ability to provide confidence in the user experience.
3. QA Wolf
QA Wolf is like Rainforest in that its service providers take automated test creation and maintenance off your team’s plate, and their services include cloud-based testing infrastructure.
But QA Wolf works exclusively in Playwright, which comes with all the shortcomings of open-source frameworks mentioned in this piece. QA Wolf is also known for being quite expensive, and their costs escalate quickly as your needs grow.
4. MuukTest
MuukTest is another test automation services provider similar to QA Wolf, although less expensive. They also only use open-source frameworks, so they have some of the same shortcomings.
5. LambdaTest
LambdaTest is primarily a provider of an all-in-one platform for teams using open-source testing frameworks. They also offer professional services as an add-on.
Like Rainforest, LambdaTest offers visual testing in addition to the DOM-based testing done by open-source tools, but LambdaTest’s approach to visual testing is unsophisticated and can lead to flaky, unreliable tests.
Talk to us about arranging a personalized demo of Rainforest QA