Pricing | Rainforest QA

Frequently asked questions

What payment methods can I use?

Contracts are invoiced with net 30 payment terms. You can pay via AWS Marketplace, ACH, wire transfer, or Bill.com e-payment.

How easy is it to get up and running?

The platform has been designed from the ground up to be intuitive and simple to use, so there's no special training required. Since we provide all the testing infrastructure you need, the only setup you’ll need to do is entering the URL of the website you’d like to test.

Once you’re ready to run your tests, it’s as simple as pushing a button and choosing what browser / operating system configuration you want to run your tests on. In as little as a couple of minutes, you’ll have comprehensive test results including regression steps, HTTP logs, browser logs, and video recordings of every test.

Based on your needs, you might want to make additional configurations. These are the most common:

Add your staging and/or QA environments to Rainforest
Upload your own test data
Add Rainforest tests to your CI/CD pipeline

How is your test automation different from other solutions?

Unlike Selenium, Cypress, Playwright and other code-based frameworks, our proprietary testing automation doesn’t require any coding, so anyone can use it to write, run, and update automated tests. You don’t need to hire an expensive engineer to manage your automated test suite.

Many other “no code” solutions are simply a front-end wrapper around Selenium. You might not need code to create a test, but you’ll need to look at code or have coding skills to update any tests. The Rainforest automation product was built from the ground up to support no-code usage in every step of the testing process: writing, running, and updating tests, and evaluating test results.

Finally, in spite of what they’ll tell you, Selenium-based solutions do not do true user interface (UI) testing. Their tests don’t interact with the UI of your app; they evaluate the underlying code ("the DOM”). There are two major implications of this approach:

DOM-based tests can miss issues that’d be obvious to your users. For example, a DOM-based test that confirms the presence of an important button (like the signup button) could pass, even if the button is inadvertently blocked by a popup. Only by interacting with the UI (not the underlying code) would you see the issue.
A DOM-based approach adds extra brittleness to tests. If someone changed the code-based name of a button from “signup_button” to “signup_button1”, for example, a Selenium test looking for the button could fail — even if the button still exists. That means someone with the right coding skills would need to find the part of the test that needs to be updated and then fix it.

Unlike DOM-based solutions, Rainforest automated tests interact with the actual UI of your app, so you can be confident that you’re testing exactly what your users and customers will experience. Any changes you make to underlying code that don’t affect the UI won’t break Rainforest tests. Rainforest tests are designed to fail only when your UI doesn’t match “passing” expectations. It’s true UI testing.

Even with these unique features and capabilities, Rainforest QA requires almost zero training to get up-and-running, unlike the majority of other test automation platforms, including other no- and low-code solutions.

How quickly can Rainforest provide test results?

We deliver test results from automation in 3.5 mins, on average, and from our community of testers in 17 minutes, on average.

Part of how we deliver results quickly is by running tests in parallel, whether the tests are executed by our automation service or by our worldwide community of QA specialists, who are available on-demand, 24x7.

Do you use real devices?

No, for several reasons including scalability, speed, security, we only run tests on virtual machines (VMs).

Thanks to the wide availability and affordability of cloud-based computing power, we can spin up a number of VMs to meet your testing needs in real-time.

We spin up a clean VM for every test, which is faster and easier than resetting a physical device every time you want to run a test. After a VM is done running a test, we destroy it, along with any of your sensitive test data.

Because we don’t test on real hardware, we can’t help you test hardware-specific features like video recording, audio recording, taking photos, and using non-spoofed location services.

Which browsers and platforms are supported?

All plans support testing on Google Chrome on Windows 10.

You can customize your plan to include new and older versions of desktop and mobile operating systems, platforms, and browsers:

Operating systems: Windows, MacOS, iOS for iPhone and iPad (simulators), Android Phone & Tablet (virtual devices)
Browsers: Chrome (Win, Mac, Android), Firefox (Win, Mac), Edge (Win), Internet Explorer (Win), Safari (Mac, iOS)

Note: We don't currently support test automation on mobile. We support manual testing of mobile experiences via our community of on-demand QA specialists.

Here’s the full list of 40+ browsers, operating systems, and virtual devices supported on Rainforest.

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When would I use automated testing vs. manual testing?

Many product teams struggle with the right balance of automated vs. manual testing. A good test strategy involves the right application of both methods. Here’s how we think about it:

Automated testing is best for the mindless, repetitive tests that you find yourself running over and over again on stable features of your app. (Computers are great for mindless, repetitive tasks.) These typically include smoke tests and regression tests.

Manual testing by humans is perfect for the tests that can’t — or shouldn’t — be automated.

For frequent UI changes: Do you want to test a new part of your app that’s subject to ongoing user interface (UI) changes? People are flexible and can roll with frequent changes, whereas automated tests would have to be updated for every UI change, no matter how small.
For subjective feedback: Do you need subjective feedback like, “Do the images look clear?” Then you need the subjective judgment you can only get from human testers.

Our community of human testers can follow any of the step-by-step test cases, or “test scripts”, that you create in Rainforest. We also offer an exploratory testing service, in which a group of our testers will explore your app in an unscripted way, trying to uncover bugs and edge cases not covered by your test scripts.

On the Rainforest platform, automated testing of mobile experiences isn't supported, so you’ll want to run those tests manually with our tester community, too.

Want to learn more? We go deep on this subject in this article.

Do you do mobile testing?

We support manual testing of mobile experiences via our community of on-demand QA specialists. Test automation on mobile is not officially supported.

The simulators and virtual devices in our cloud-based infrastructure include the latest and previous operating systems, phones, and tablets from Apple and Android. (We don’t test on real devices.) You can find the full list of supported mobile configurations on this page.

Will Rainforest work with my CI/CD pipeline?

Yes. Rainforest was built from day one to work within continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows. (In fact, we think implementing CI/CD is one of the best things you can do to improve product quality.) To that end, Rainforest has a first-class API, CLI tooling, CircleCI Orb, and GitHub Action.

Talk to us about a custom plan

All plans include

Custom onboarding & support

Frequently asked questions