13 Best Black Box Testing Tools Reviewed For 2024

QA Wolf is an automated hybrid testing platform and service designed to simplify and enhance the quality assurance process for web applications. It offers black box testing and automates end-to-end tests, ensuring that applications function correctly from the user's perspective.

Why I picked QA Wolf: QA Wolf offers a unique combination of automation and human oversight. The platform allows for automated end-to-end tests, which mimic real user interactions with the application. This approach ensures that all critical user flows are thoroughly tested without requiring insight into the underlying code. Furthermore, QA Wolf’s human QA engineers provide ongoing support, triage, and maintenance of tests, ensuring reliability and reducing the burden on development teams. 

QA Wolf Standout Features:

• The platform runs tests in parallel, reducing testing time and accelerating feedback loops.
• Provides detailed bug reports with video walk-throughs and trace logs, making it easy for developers to diagnose and fix issues.
• Supports a wide range of test scenarios, including UI interactions, API testing, and third-party integrations
• Round-the-clock QA engineers provide continuous support, reviewing test failures and maintaining test suites, ensuring consistent quality.

QA Wolf Integrations: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub, Jira, Asana, Linear, and more.

Mobot is an automated testing tool designed to streamline mobile and web testing by giving testing responsibilities to a mechanical robot. As a result, all tests are almost entirely manual, with the robot carrying out functions and comparing them to a baseline in order to produce a report.

Why I picked Mobot: Due to its manual testing environment, Mobot test plans do not need to include code or even writing. All you need to do is film the test you'd like to run and explain exactly how you want it to be done. The Mobot team can easily convert the video into a custom test plan. Once the plan is automated, the robots can carry out multiple tests at once and generate a report that you can use to identify and fix bugs.

Mobot Standout Features:

• All of Mobot's results are carefully verified by a customer success manager who will flag certain tests for discussion and point out failed tests to make reading reports that much easier.
• All reports include side-by-side testing results compare test screenshots to baseline screenshots.
• Robots perform tests on real devices to help identify device-specific issues, rather than relying on emulators and simulators.
• Robots can also test Bluetooth connections between the testing device and various third party devices, such as headphones.

Mobot Integrations: Mobot integrates with tools like Jira, Slack, and Github. It also supports both Android and iOS.

Price: Mobot pricing starts at $1,500/month/action. Further pricing information is available upon request. A 30-day free trial is available.

Gremlin is an automation framework for systematic and resilience testing based on chaos testing, a subset of chaos engineering. It is geared toward the modern era of computing, as it is helpful for testing cloud apps, microservices, and container-based applications.

Why I picked Gremlin: the tool deliberately breaks things in the tested app and then learns how to make it resilient. It does this by executing tests that allow testers to manipulate inter-service messages at the network level. 

The tool’s zero-regression approach helps to minimize service disruptions and code rollbacks that typically attend poorly resilient software products. 

Gremlin Standout Features

• Testing failure handling capabilities in cloud infrastructure and applications such as containers and microservices.
• Gremlin’s test automation allows you to test each application layer of infrastructure rigorously, including safely halting and automatically rolling back.
• It comes with a well-documented API and CI/CD to prepare ship quality code fast by running tests that magnify system reliability.  
• With Gremlin, you can use a set of 12 Chaos engineering experiments to test for weaknesses in an underlying system.

Gremlin Integrations: Gremlin integrates with LoadRunner Professional 2022. 

Price: Gremlin’s pricing starts at $300 per month per service. A 30-day free trial is available.

Ranorex Studio is a full-featured test automation platform provided by Ranorex GmbH. it provides rapid delivery test automation for desktop, web, and mobile applications. In addition to functional UI tests, Ranorex provides various testing approaches, such as black box, data-driven, regression, key-word driven, and cross-browser testing.

Ranorex is flexible and provides codeless automation. This makes it ideal for both beginners and testing experts. It provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface that allows users to easily drag-and-drop UI elements and code modules. 

Ranorex allows cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively by sharing test automation modules and other repositories and reusable objects. 

Ranorex Standout Features

• You can use Ranorex to script with programming languages such as VB.NET and C#. it also supports many technologies such as .NET Core, Java, C++, Microsoft Access, Power Builder, and more.
• Ranorex allows you to generate powerful scenarios in your test environment and injects crucial variations.
• In addition to testing mobile and native iOs environments, Ranorex can run regression tests on both virtual and physical machines.
• Machine-trained object detection and intelligent code completion properties and reusable modules with coded automation.
• In addition to recording and replaying test actions, Ranorex has the ability to run parallel tests. 
• You can generate test reports in HTML, JUnit-compatible reports, or PDF, including video reporting of test execution. 

Ranorex Integrations: Ranorex comes with a built-in Selenium WebDriver which enables it to be versatile and distributed. Other integrations include Jenkins, Jira, TestRail, Azure DevOps, TestShell, Microsoft Studio, SQL, Git, and so on. 

Price: Pricing is customized and available upon request. A 30-day free trial is available.

The IBM Rational Functional Tester is an automated testing framework from IBM for regression, functional, and GUI testing. It can be used for different programming languages and environments, such as Java, AJAX, Power Builder, SAP, .Net, Dojo Toolkit, and Siebel, while encompassing both web-based and terminal emulator-based applications.

Why I picked IBM RFT: the tool gives test engineers the ability to record, playback, and export test scripts with Robotic Response Time agents. In addition, it provides intelligent script maintenance capabilities and various customization options. 

When manual testing is impossible to scale effectively, RFT is ideal for a broad range of scenarios. It benefits businesses and organizations of various types, from freelancers, and SMBs, to enterprises. The tool has reporting capabilities that support communication and collaboration in hybrid environments. 

RFT Standout Features

• IBM Rational Functional Tester provides capabilities for the end-to-end testing of seemingly diverse systems, which yields a broad range of coverage for QA teams. It allows the flexibility to test legacy and modern applications in different business scenarios.
• RFT facilitates the acceleration of shorter test cycles because it enables test engineers to reuse the same tests with different data sets.
• RFT’s advanced test scripting features, like its Rational Performance Tester. It lets you view and analyze the response time, events, and other metrics during playback. With its ScriptAssure technology, you can handle frequent user interface changes remarkably without incurring much maintenance overhead. 

RFT Standout Integrations: RFT provides integrations with other IBM products, such as IBM Jazz® integration, which supports collaborative application lifecycle management. It also integrates with non-native enterprise messaging solutions like JMS and TIBCO EMS.

Price: Pricing is only available upon request. RFT’s Starter Edition is free.

Watir, which stands for “Web Testing Application in Ruby,” is an open-source, automated test tool for the Ruby programming language. 

Why I picked Watir: One of the ideal things about this black box testing tool is that it enables the writing of tests in a human way by simulating how users interact with a browser. 

It is testing based on automating your browser with Ruby libraries. The tool achieves this by leveraging the built-in OLE capabilities of Ruby to automate browsers. 

Watir Standout Features

• Instead of creating a browser simulator like most web-based testing systems, Watir uses OLE protocol to enable a smoother inter-process communication between the browser and Ruby libraries.
• Watir supports the most common and relevant browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. 
• Watir boosts the efficiency and effectiveness of your tests and test suites by enabling you to run tests simultaneously. 
• Watir facilitates command-line testing so you can execute UI tests without opening a browser, also known as headless testing.
• With page objects, Watir allows testers to reuse code as classes, minimizing code duplication. Meanwhile, it also allows you to measure page performance using its performance object and related properties. 

Watir Integrations: Provides integration for cross-browser and automation testing tools such as Cucumber, BrowserStack, and SauceLabs. In addition to Ruby, it also integrates with Python, Rails, and Selenium.  

Price: Watir is open-source and free.

MbUnit is a generative and extensible unit testing framework for the C# release by the open Gallio Automation Platform. Previously known as GUnit, MbUnit is feature-rich and comes with a common object model that other test frameworks can capitalize on. 

It is simple to use and follows the Simple Test Pattern design pattern to boost the testers’ output, using SetUp, Test, and TearDown actions. MbUnit also comes with XML and serialization assertions.

MbUnit Standout Features

• MbUnit provides a common object model, including a runtime service for the .NET framework. Other test frameworks can use this to extend their own capabilities. 
• MbUint uses the Assert class, along with other variations of its unit testing event actions. This also includes support for unit testing your XML code. 
• To get the most out of your core multi-core CPU, especially with execution-heavy test suites, MbUnit allows you to mark any test as parallelizable. This subsequently enables the marked test to run parallel with other parallelizable tests in the same fixture.

MbUnit Integrations: No clear-cut integrations are identified except for the implied assumption that it can be plugged in by apps and test suites that use the .NET framework. 

QTP/UFT is designed to operate without the need for monitoring systems to intervene. It is designed by Micro Focus and focuses on functional, regression, and service testing.

QTP/UFT (Unified Functional Testing) serves both technical and non-technical users. This unified testing paradigm tests both the front-end and back-end components of a system, supporting both GUI and API testing using virtualized facilities. 

QTP/UFT Standout Features

• QTP/UFT allows users to automate actions, then identify and test bugs in real time. 
• Testing activities without monitoring the system in intervals while also applying uniformity of actions on different users, data sets, and various browsers on Windows operating systems.
• QTP/UFT provides all services under a common IDE, including GUI testing and non-GUI using API Service Test. 
• QTP/UFT uses VB Script as a scripting language.

QTP/UFT Integrations: QTP/UFT uses ALM to integrate with other HP products. It also integrates with SAP and Oracle.

Price: QTP/UFT is provided upon request.

Katalon Studio is a free, comprehensive automation testing toolkit with a Selenium-based engine, although it has introduced priced upgrades. 

Why I picked Katalon: It is an  AI-augmented platform to produce automated tests and uses Groovy as a language. However, Katalon allows you to reuse automated scripts without coding. It provides web, API, visual, desktop, and mobile testing. Powered by its end-to-end software development ecosystem, Katalon enables DevOps to deliver solutions quickly.

Katalon Standout Features

• Katalon also offers beginners a low-code experience with reusable test artifacts and a unified IDE to test all apps. 
• With a runtime engine that streamlines execution, Katalon fosters scheduling, self-healing, smart waits so you can run parallel execution in browsers, devices, and OS.
• Katalon’s extensive data and keyword-driven testing, coupled with autonomous script generation, provides actionable insights and effective root-cause analysis.
• Native CI/CD offers real-time notifications and holistic end-to-end pipeline visibility while providing experts an abundant DevOps integrations.
• Fast and auto-record-and-playback that quickly responds to real-world scenarios.

Katalon Integrations: Katalon can be integrated with CI/CD tools such as Jira, Bamboo, and Jenkins. 

Price: Katalon is free, but it also has Premium and Ultimate plans. The Premium plan starts at $25 per month, and you need to contact Katalon for a quote on its Ultimate plans.

Free trial: In addition to a forever free plan, the Premium plan offers a 30-day free trial period. 

AutoHotkey is a free and open-source scripting utility that allows you to automate repeated tasks. The tool is designed for Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022 and is lightweight, fast, and stable. 

Why I picked AutoHotkey: As a macro-creation software, the tool allows you to send user-generated mouse clicks and keystrokes to an application easily. Besides reducing data-entry tasks, the tool enables developers to perform sophisticated tasks such as creating form fillers. Moreover, AutoHotkey is fully programmable, supporting various concepts like arrays, matrices, and component object models (COM). 

AutoHotkey Standout Features

• With its scripts and macros, AutoHotkey allows users to customize shortcuts and remap keys with lightweight automation.
• You can create small and complex scripts to accomplish various productivity tasks like user-entry forms. 
• The internal language command allows you to parse script files with programming paradigms like object orientation, procedural programming, and command-based programming. 
• AutoHotkey allows you to structure its scripts as independent modules, especially with subroutines such as functions, Hotstrings, and Hotkeys with portable auto-execute sections. 

AutoHotkey Integrations: AutoHotkey can integrate with platforms like Git, VSCode, and PowerShell.

Price: AutoHotkey is open-source and free.