Plans & Pricing

Yes. The Professional plan includes everything you need for no-code automated testing, for free – no credit card required.

Chat support has 14-day free trial and then requires a credit card. But even if you enter a credit card number to unlock this feature, there’s no subscription fee. The only time you’ll pay is if you run more than five hours of automated testing in a month (each additional hour is $5/hour).

You don’t need a credit card to get started, or to have ongoing access to all of the testing features available in the Professional plan.

The only time you’ll need to enter a credit card is if you want to unlock chat support. (There's no subscription fee.)

You can start writing your first automated test immediately after signing up for Rainforest. 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
  

Unlike Selenium, Cypress, and similar 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 coding skills to update any tests. (And every QA tester knows that test maintenance is an ongoing exercise.) 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.

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. 

As part of our Premium plan, our community of human testers can follow any of the step-by-step test cases, or “test scripts”, that you create in Rainforest. Also in the Premium plan, we 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.

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

The Professional plan includes new and older versions of the following desktop operating systems and browsers:

• Operating systems: Windows, MacOS
• Browsers: Chrome (Win), Firefox (Win), Edge (Win), Internet Explorer (Win), Safari (Mac)
  

The Premium plan includes 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)

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A test created for automated testing on Rainforest will typically work best on the browser on which it was created. For example, if you create an automated test using Google Chrome on Windows 10, that test will run best (i.e., without “false positive” test failures) on Google Chrome on Windows 10. 

The reason for this is that automated Rainforest tests use pixel-matching to look for and identify UI elements on a page. This allows us to do true UI testing and evaluate your app in the way your users will experience it. (Compare this to many other automated testing frameworks that claim to do UI testing, but actually evaluate the code underlying the UI. This approach can miss actual UI issues and cause tests to fail when minor behind-the-scenes code changes are made.)

Because every major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) renders the UI of a web page slightly differently, automated Rainforest tests might not locate an element (like a button) in one browser that appears differently in another browser.

On our Premium plan, our on-demand QA testers can manually run your tests across any combination of browsers.

Yes, as part of our Premium plan, 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.

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. You can run up to 500 tests in parallel on our VMs and you don’t have to pay extra for using extra machines — you only pay for the fixed hourly price of testing. Compare that with 3rd-party testing grids like BrowserStack that get (much) more expensive as you do more automated testing in parallel.

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.

We run the tests from every test suite 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. 

Even if you kick off a test suite containing 500 tests, we'll run all of those tests at the same time. That's how we can deliver test results from automation in 3.5 mins, on average, and from our community of testers in 17 minutes, on average.

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.