In this article, we compare 22 of the best website and application testing tools based on their features, pricing, and best use cases.
When you build and deliver websites and software applications for dozens (or hundreds!) of clients, website testing gets complicated and time-consuming.
You need the right website testing tools to make this easier.
Without the right tools, website and software application testing can get out of hand. Feedback gets lost in PM tools or Slack messages. Simple debug tasks get overly complicated.
When your QA team team is properly equipped, they can:
- Fix bugs
- Test security, performance, and API integrations
- Use frameworks to implement regression, cross-browser, cross-device, and functional testing
- Improve user experience across all web pages
- …and so much more!
In order to make it easier to find the right software for your web development agency, we’ve broken this list down into different segments:
- Bug tracking and bug reporting
- Security testing
- Functional and regression testing
- Performance and load testing
- API testing
- Cross-browser and cross-device testing
- Test automation and test cases
Let’s dive in.
Bug tracking and bug reporting
1. Marker.io
Receive feedback and visual, data-rich bug reports from clients, colleagues, users, and other stakeholders without them leaving your website or app.
Great website testing tools need the following features:
- A simple and effective “one-click” system for clients and users to report bugs and give feedback
- Screenshots and visual annotations so that reports are easy to action
- Automatic environment info and console log data capture
- Deep integration with the PM tools you already use (Jira, GitHub, Trello…)
- Support for alpha and beta testing test cases
The good news is, Marker.io does it all.
Capture visual user feedback
Bug testing is an important part of iterative web and app development feedback loops.
Internal testing and reports from clients and users are crucial to ensure a website or app runs smoothly out in the wild. Bottlenecks should be fixed quickly.
Reporting a bug is a simple 3-step process with Marker.io:
- Find a bug, and click the button (a simple form pops up for the user/client).
- Fill out a report and input details (it automatically captures environment info).
- Click on "Create issue"—and the report is sent to devs and the QA team.
It’s as easy as: see a bug, click, annotate, and send!
Check it out:
Detailed bug reporting
As project managers know all too well, when you’ve got non-technical people crawling over a website looking for bugs, vital details get missed.
Developers need to recreate the right environment to know what needs fixing.
With Marker.io, all of the technical data is automatically captured with the bug report and sent directly to your PM tool.
You’ll get the following info with every report:
- What URL they were on
- Environment and console logs
- Metadata (browser, OS, device)
- Built-in session replay, so you can tell exactly what was happening when the error occurred
- etc.
2-way project management tool integrations
Bug reports and other feedback about a website or app usually comes through numerous channels.
Clients and users give developers and agencies feedback through email, Slack, spreadsheets, presentations, documents, videos, and even phone calls.
After it all comes in, someone needs to spend hours collecting and assigning this feedback to the right teams or team members in a PM tool.
Only then can it be actioned.
With Marker.io, this is a thing of the past.
- Get feedback via one channel (Marker.io's website widget or in-app forms)
- Feedback and bug reports go directly into your PM tool—including playback of your user session
- As soon as an issue is marked as “Done” in your PM tool, it’s also “Resolved” in Marker.io
- You can even set it up so the client or user is automatically notified
No more endless back-and-forth, or super long email threads. No more additional headaches when some issues have been resolved and others still need a little more work.
Any extra comments clients leave will automatically sync with your PM tool. Both parties can keep in contact this way.
Your PM tool becomes a single source of truth for every individual website or app project. If an issue isn’t logged in your PM tool, it doesn’t exist!
Check out our 2-way sync in action:
Customizable internal & external feedback forms
When clients or end-users want to report bugs or feedback this should be as simple as possible. Remove any friction so they can tell you what needs fixing.
More detailed feedback forms, on the other hand, are needed for colleagues and others who are familiar with the website or app.
With Marker.io, you get the best of both worlds: Guest forms (for bug reports and UAT testing) and Member forms (for internal QA).
Using the guest form is simple, and screenshots and testing data is automatically included.
For internal QA testing, these forms are completely customizable. You can add or remove as many fields and metrics as you need, and even automatically assign issues to a team member.
Marker.io comes with everything you need for fast, efficient, and frictionless website testing, as well as client, user, and internal feedback.
Ready to give it a go? Sign up for a free trial here—no credit card required.
Pricing: $39/mo.
2. Jira Software
Jira is a project management tool popular with agile web development teams.
The cloud-based software has an endless stream of customization options and is perfect for manual testing, bug tracking, and bug reporting for internal teams.
Pricing: $0 (10 users), up to $15.25/mo per user.
3. ClickUp
ClickUp is a multi-feature PM tool that comes with hundreds of plugins and integrations that developers need to manage website and app development projects.
It includes documentation, reporting, and bug tracking tools, although you may need something like Marker.io to ensure clients and users can report bugs to the team.
Pricing: from free (for personal use), up to $29/mo per user.
Security testing
4. Intruder
Intruder is an online vulnerability tracker for websites and applications, helping developers, QA, and security testing teams identify weaknesses in real-time.
Intruder monitors and tests for weaknesses across your entire tech stack—servers, cloud systems, websites, and endpoint devices.
Pricing is based on the number of targets you need to scan. With 1 target (website or app), pricing starts from around $80/mo.
5. Invicti
Automated application security testing, at scale.
Invicti is a security system specifically designed for web apps, software (SaaS) & APIs on a large scale (hundreds or thousands of digital assets).
Invicti is used by global brands such as Ford, Cisco, General Mills, and dozens of others. They provide app security (AppSec) at scale, with automation built into every layer of a company’s SLDC.
Pricing: Custom based on your needs.
6. Astra
Astra is a security software suite created by developers who’ve worked at Microsoft, Facebook, Buffer, Adobe, and other market-leading tech companies.
Astra includes automated application penetration testing (Pentest Suite), API scanning, and manual security testing. It also comes with website protection software that can be live in 3 minutes.
Pricing: from $99/mo for Pentest and $25/mo for Website Protection.
Functional and regression testing
7. Selenium
Selenium is one of many testing automation tools.
It’s an open source project for end-to-end, automated, browser-based testing.
Selenium includes three core products:
- WebDriver. Regression automation suites and tests on interactive, real browsers.
- Selenium IDE. Bug reproduction scripts for Chrome, Firefox and Edge;
- Selenium Grid. Scripts for running tests automatically across dozens of browsers and operating systems.
Pricing: Free (open source).
8. Avo Assure
Avo Assure is an automated testing platform.
Dev teams and product managers can also use it to create bug-testing data in a production-like environment, and auto-document business and software processes to improve product features.
Pricing: Custom, based on your needs.
9. Test IO
Test IO provides real humans to deliver flexible QA testing services for software and website development companies.
Test IO promises to make the QA and UAT process faster and smoother, helping dev teams ship better products.
Pricing: Custom, based on your needs.
10. W3C CSS Validator
A free and open source way to validate CSS documents.
The W3C CSS Validation Service is free software provided by the W3C Foundation to help developers validate Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) against W3C CSS specifications.
This way, you can quickly check whether website design documents are suitable from a usability perspective during UI testing.
Pricing: Free (open source)
11. Watir
Functional web application testing for Ruby apps.
Watir is a functional Ruby library for automating application testing.
Watir is an open-source project powered by Selenium, created for the Ruby on Rails community and developers who build web apps and software using Ruby.
Pricing: Free (open-source)
Performance and load testing
12. Apache JMeter
A pure Java application for testing load functions and performance.
Apache JMeter is Java-based software for testing website load functions, performance, servers, networks, and objects to assess applications for performance under different load conditions.
It’s also useful for identifying and reporting bugs on various browsers and operating systems.
Pricing: Free (open source).
13. WebLOAD
WebLOAD is an end-to-end load testing tool for developers to test applications’ performance under massive user load conditions.
It helps product managers see how applications, servers, databases, and other components cope when there are thousands or millions of users on your app.
Pricing: you can download a Trial version for free, but would need to ask for a custom price to access more features.
14. NeoLoad
Tricentis NeoLoad is a tool for continuous performance and load testing under heavy web/app use conditions, allowing you to identify bottlenecks before they become a real problem.
NeoLoad simplifies and scales performance testing for everything from websites and apps to microservices and cloud servers.
Pricing: From $20,000 (300 virtual users, billed annually)
15. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google for developers to test website page loading speeds cross-platform, on all devices and browsers.
Pricing: free.
API Testing
16. Testim
Quality software at DevOps speeds.
Tricentis provides a range of services and solutions for testing, QA, and UAT, including API testing. One of their products is NeoLoad, as we’ve covered previously.
Another product is Testim, an AI-powered QA platform ideal for automated API and web app testing.
Tricentis offers a range of other products for dev teams and product managers wanting to test software, applications, and websites.
Pricing: Custom, based on your needs.
17. ReadyAPI
ReadyAPI by SmartBear is an automated, low-code API testing environment and tool. It’s ideal for seeing how APIs perform under heavy user loads.
Pricing: from $755/license (billed annually).
Cross-browser and cross-device testing
18. BrowserStack
BrowserStack is designed to test apps and websites across hundreds of devices, browsers, and operating systems (over 3000).
Test compatibility across multiple devices with ease.
Pricing: from $39/mo up to $150/mo.
19. Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs provides multiple testing environments: every browser/OS and device combination, including mobile beta testing, error reporting, and bug fixing.
And loads of other features!
Pricing: From $49/mo up to $249/mo.
20. Digital.ai
A knowledge base and platform for testing apps across thousands of devices
Digital.ai is a continuous testing platform environment for mobile and web apps, powered by Atlassian Confluence.
It includes real mobile devices, Android emulators, iOS simulators, and desktop browser environments, so you can test anything on any device, OS and platform combination you can imagine.
Pricing: Free (open-source)
Automated web testing and test scripts
21. testRigor
testRigor takes care of implementing, automating, and maintaining test environments—with desktops, mobile browsers, and native operating systems available.
QA testing engineers simply have to write what they want testing and testRigor automatically implements the required scenarios—you only need to deal with test results.
Pricing: A free open-source version is available, and they also have a private option for $900/mo.
22. LambdaTest
LambdaTest has over 1 million QA and UAT engineers using their platform worldwide. You can simulate over 3000 browser, phone, and operating system environments.
Features include live, automated, and mobile app testing, alongside the ability to test at scale.
Pricing: 2 options, Live ($15/mo) and Real Device ($25/mo), with the price you pay depending on the number of parallel tests per month (e.g. 10 x Live is $150/mo, billed annually).
Frequently Asked Questions
What are web testing tools?
Website and application testing tools cover a vast family of software solutions. We’ve included as many of the top ones as we could in this article.
Because website and web application testing is such a huge industry, you can use testing tools for a wide range of purposes:
- Testing a website or app across thousands of devices
- Testing loading speeds, security, or APIs
- Automated testing
- etc.
The good news is, there are more than enough tools for these challenges that developers and agencies regularly encounter.
It’s worth having a few web and app testing tools in your tech stack.
What is the purpose of web testing?
Start with your goals in mind. What do you want to accomplish with website and application testing?
The goals for this should be simple. Make sure every website and application you build for clients is secure, loads quickly, integrates with other software as needed, and works perfectly, free from bugs.
QA teams work hard to ensure software, apps, and websites meet and exceed client expectations.
Testing tools help them achieve these objectives, and the best tools accelerate, automate, and streamline the process.
How do you choose a website testing tool?
To make your search easier, start by asking the right questions:
- What tool(s) do we need?
- What do we need them for? E.g. UAT, QA, API, bug, security, load, cross-device, or other types of testing.
- What features would make our lives easier?
- What’s our budget for these tool(s)?
- Do we need integrations with other tools, such as project management apps?
- Do we want clients and users to test on staging or live sites to report feedback?
Look for tools with the right features, that solve specific problems you are having, at the right price point, and with lots of happy customers and reviews to prove they’re worth investing in.
And there we have it—a list of the best 22 website and web app testing tools.
With this list, it should be easier to pick the right software to solve your testing problems.
We hope you find this list helpful when choosing a website testing tool.
Did we miss anything? Let us know on Twitter or via email!
