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With so many different cloud testing tools available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to evaluate the performance, security, and functionality of your cloud-based applications but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different cloud testing software with various teams and projects, with my picks of the best cloud testing tools.

What Are Cloud Testing Tools?

Cloud testing tools are software used for testing the performance, scalability, and reliability of applications hosted in cloud environments. These tools simulate real-world user traffic and various operational conditions to assess how cloud-based applications perform, ensuring they meet the necessary quality and functionality standards.

The benefits of cloud testing tools include cost savings, as they eliminate the need for physical infrastructure for testing. They offer flexibility to test applications under diverse conditions and loads, accurately reflecting real-world usage scenarios. These tools enable rapid testing and deployment, facilitating a faster time-to-market for applications. Additionally, they provide comprehensive insights into application performance and security, helping to ensure a consistent and secure user experience across different platforms and geographic locations.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Cloud Testing Tools

Here’s a brief description of each cloud testing tool to showcase each one’s best use case, some noteworthy features, screenshots, and pricing information.

Best for real-time performance insights for cloud-based applications and infrastructure

  • Free plan available
  • From $25/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.3/5

New Relic is all about application performance management and monitoring. It's a tool that's designed to help you keep an eye on your software and make sure everything's running smoothly. It's like having a 24/7 watchdog for your apps, making sure they're performing at their best and alerting you if anything goes wrong.

Why I picked New Relic: There are a few standout features that really make New Relic shine. First off, it's got real-time analytics. This means you can see exactly what's happening with your software, right as it's happening. It's also got an intuitive dashboard that makes it easy to understand your data. Plus, it's got a great alert system that lets you know if anything's going wrong, so you can fix it before it becomes a big problem.

New Relic Standout Features & Integrations

Features include backend monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, mobile monitoring, model performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log management, error tracking, network monitoring, vulnerability management, and browser monitoring. 

Integrations include over 500 apps, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, Slack, PagerDuty, and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Integrates seamlessly with popular dev tools
  • AI-powered anomaly detection and intelligent alerting
  • Wide range of monitoring capabilities

Cons:

  • Added complexity from reliance on agents installed on application servers
  • Bit of a learning curve

Best highly-customizable, automation test tool

  • 30-Day free trial and free plan available
  • From $399/Monthly
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Rating: 4.6/5

Testsigma is an open-source automation tool that provides QA teams and test engineers with the ability to customize tests for a variety of test profiles, whether they want to execute data-driven, regression, cross-browser, mobile, or continuous testing mechanisms.

Why I picked Testsigma: Although Testsigma works out of the box, it is highly configurable for a variety of end-to-end tests. It gives testers the flexibility of going code-agnostic, creating simple test scripts, or adopting AI-driven auto-pilot test maintenance. 

Testsigma is ideal for development teams who are burdened with executing various test suites with a plethora of test scenarios. Testsigma’s SDKs and APIs help them to both customize and automate the process to meet their requirements. 

Testsigma Standout Features and Integrations

Features include AI-driven test automations, cross-platform compatibility, cloud-based testing, continuous integration, reporting, multi-language support, and collaboration tools. 

Integrations include Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, Jira, Trello, BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, Scrum, Kanban, Appium, Selendroid, Postman, and Swagger.

Testsigma offers customized pricing upon request. Testsigma is free to use with some feature limitations. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Open source, ease of use along with cross-platform compatibility.
  • Flexible, with multiple programming language support.
  • No coding experience is required to use Testsigma.

Cons:

  • It still poses a challenge to automate complex tests.
  • Some of its desired features aren’t included in the open-source version.

Best cloud testing tool for versatility

  • Free for unlimited use

AppPerfect is a proprietary, fully automated performance, load, and stress test execution suite. It provides suites for various functionalities, such as load and web testing, including agentless monitoring and big-data analytics. 

Why I picked AppPerfect: AppPerfect runs on operating system platforms like Windows, Linux, Solaris, UNIX-based systems, and macOS. It can simulate thousands of tests to test your application infrastructure realistically. 

Its rich set of features is designed for both QA professionals and developers. It helps test teams identify issues and problems with a software application before it goes into production. However, no programming experience is required to use AppPerfect. 

AppPerfect Standout Features & Integrations

Features include test management, automation, test & browser recording, agentless monitoring, and generated ready-made scripts.

Integrations include Jdeveloper, NetBeans, IntelliJ Idea, JBuilder, Salesforce, and Eclipse. 

AppPerfect is free for unlimited use.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Cross-platform support.
  • GUI-enabled for smooth, user-friendly operations.
  • All-time free usage.

Cons:

  • Limited documentation provided.
  • Limited third-party integrations.

Best network protocol analyzer testing tool

  • Free To Use
  • Open source project and available for free

Wireshark is an open-source package tool and analyzer for network vulnerability and penetration tests. It is called a packet sniffer due to its ability to act as a network monitoring tool. 

Why I picked Wireshark: Wireshark helps both security specialists and testers obtain the precise picture of a network to troubleshoot issues effectively. Its network and telephony analysis runs on all the major OSs, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. 

As one of the foremost network traffic capture tools, Wireshark helps to resolve the root cause of packet problems, such as where there’s a network depreciation and why packets are getting dropped. 

Wireshark Standout Features & Integrations

Features include decryption support, color-coded schemes, protocol decoding, live capture, offline analysis, deep packet inspection, and display filters.

Integrations include third-party platforms such as Network Critical, Kali Linux, and EndaceProbes. 

Wireshark is free and open source.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Comes with powerful display filters.
  • An open-source security tool that’s free to everyone.
  • Provides offline analysis in addition to live capture.

Cons:

  • You can’t alter or generate packets with Wireshark.
  • It can’t be run outside a network since it doesn’t allow packet injection.

Best cloud distributed tracing tool

  • Free To Use

Spring Cloud Sleuth is a real-time distributed tracing tool for Spring Boot. It is a layer over a Tracer library named Brave and provides auto-configuration for enhanced logging. DevOps and QA testers can subsequently use these logs to trace requests. 

Why I picked Cloud Sleuth: Cloud Sleuth makes it possible to trace the request propagation within microservices. Cloud Sleuth's most important use case is diagnosing cloud-based applications, which tend to be complex, especially since the advent of microservices. Microservices are notoriously difficult to test and debug. This is because one action by a user can trigger a cascade chain of downstream microservice calls.

It is ideal for identifying logs that pertain to a particular application request, thread, or job.  

Cloud Sleuth Standout Features & Integrations 

Features include distributed tracing, trace data reports, data visualizations, test controller, cloud resource monitoring, and multi-cloud support.

Integrations include Zipkin, Logback, SLF4J, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), GitLab, Jenkins, Elasticsearch, Splunk, MySQL, and MongoDB.

Spring Cloud Sleuth is free to use.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Easy to identify where logs emanate from.
  • Excellent for troubleshooting distributed applications.
  • Can export trace data to Zipkin to provide tracing visualization.

Cons:

  • Free platform means limited-to-none customer support
  • Outdated UI

Best CI/CD testing server

  • Free
  • Open source project and available for free

Jenkins is a Java-based, open-source automation server used for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) purposes. Jenkins allows DevOps to implement various stages of the software development lifecycle, especially those involving testing, building, and deployment. 

Why I picked Jenkins: As part of the deployment pipeline, QA engineers typically use Jenkins to perform tests on code. However, Jenkins is self-contained and can be used to automate all sorts of development-aligned tasks, whether it involves delivery, deploying, building, or testing.

Jenkins can be installed on standalone machines with Java Runtime Environment (JRE). However, it can also be deployed on the cloud, with Cloud Native groups of collaborators and contributors working to improve its cloud-run environment, like offering architectural changes that optimize a stateless Jenkins.

Jenkins Standout Features & Integrations

Features include SCLC pipelines, task automations, workflow management, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), distributed builds, extensible, and open source.

Integrations include many software development and CI/CD tools like GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket, including build tools such as Gradle and Maven. Additionally, they offer over 1,700 plugins to support different kinds of automation.

Jenkins is fully open-source and free to use.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Abundant plugin support and version management.
  • Jenkins saves a lot of operational time through automating its deployment process.
  • Reduces test and deployment time.
  • Excellent facilitator for DevOps operations.

Cons:

  • It needs to be used on high performance servers.
  • Single-server architecture limits resources to a single computer or virtual machine.
  • It is very dependent on Java architecture.

Best mobile app testing platform to test on physical devices

  • 14-day free trial
  • Starts at $39/month

Bitbar Cloud is a cloud-based mobile application testing platform that provides access to a wide range of real devices and emulators for testing and automation purposes.

Why I Picked BitBar Cloud: Bitbar Cloud is a cloud-based mobile application testing platform that offers users a number of benefits and features. One of the key strengths of Bitbar Cloud is its ability to provide access to a large pool of real devices. This allows users to test their applications on a wide range of devices and operating systems, ensuring compatibility and performance across different platforms.

Bitbar Cloud also includes advanced testing capabilities, such as parallel testing, automated testing, and performance testing. These features can help users optimize their applications and ensure that they perform well under different conditions. 

BitBar Cloud Standout Features & Integrations 

Features include real device testing, third-party integrations, scalability, customization, parallel testing, automated testing, performance testing, and automated reporting. 

Integrations include Jenkins, Appium, Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, Android Studio, Xcode, and AWS Device Farm. 

BitBar Cloud costs from $47/parallel/month and comes with a 14-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Easy integration with popular tools and technologies
  • Customizable testing environments and configurations
  • Access to a large pool of real devices for testing

Cons:

  • More expensive than other testing solutions
  • Learning curve for advanced testing capabilities

Best web-browser cloud automation tool for ruby libraries

  • Free To Use

Watir is an open source library built on the Ruby programming language so that automated testing occurs the same way people interact with browsers. Incidentally, Watir is an acronym for “Web Testing Application in Ruby.”

Why I picked Watir: Watir allows test teams to write, create, and execute tests that are easy to read and maintain. This is because it operates differently than most HTTP-based test simulators, taking the browser through the OLE protocol. 

Watir is ideal for those who need a simple and flexible tool with a light footprint to execute tests. 

Watir Standout Features and Integrations

Features include cross-browser compatibility, object-oriented API, easy installation, flexible testing, dynamic web page interactions, and supports multiple web technologies.

Integrations include RSpec, Cucumber, Jenkins, Ruby, and Selenium. 

Open source and free to use. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Its in-built libraries facilitate test performance, screenshots, and other cool functionality.
  • Open source, convenient, and easy to use.
  • Multi-browser and multiple OS platform support.

Cons:

  • It lacks real-time debugging functionality.
  • Its in-built reporting needs to be enhanced.

Best cloud performance testing application

  • 30-day free trial
  • Pricing upon request

CloudTest is a performance-testing platform from SOASTA, the US subsidiary of Akamai Technologies. It provides organizations with production application readiness from the convenience of the cloud. 

Why I picked CloudTest: SOASTA CloudTest effectively leverages cloud computing resources so DevOps can focus their time and effort on delivering product features rather than building tests. CloudTest provides various forms of cross-platform support with browser recording (WebUI/Ajax), messaging (HTTP(s)), and SOAP/REST API service connectivity. It is ideal for enterprises, especially for large-scale testing. 

It aims to make testing in production feasible, safe, and easier through its ability to span dozens of cloud providers seamlessly. However, it also facilitates low-level performance tests that make it possible to detect and identify performance issues much earlier in the development lifecycle.

CloudTest Standout Features & Integrations

Features include custom dashboards, scaling tests worldwide, big-data analytics, unlimited processing, dynamic ramp, traffic simulation, load simulation, multi-user test aggregation, real-user scenarios, and drag-and-drop test cases.

Integrations include Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, VMware, Hyper-V, Apache JMeter, Gatling, Nagios, New Relic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, MySQL, MongoDB, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Glassfish, as well as Network appliances such as firewalls, load balancers, and routers.

You need to contact Akamai sales for a pricing quote for CloudTest. CloudTest provides prospective customers with a 30-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Provides organizations with the ability to test and validate code in production
  • Takes web application performance seriously
  • User-friendly interface design

Cons:

  • Display of graphs on reports need improvement.
  • Users complain of missing information with regard to load testing.

Best cloud mission control center for apps

  • From $40 monthly per build concurrency

Visual Studio App Center is a comprehensive Microsoft cloud platform for building high-quality applications for a diverse range of platforms, whether on Windows, Android, iOS, Cordova, UWP, or macOS platforms. 

Microsoft has described App Center as “the next generation of Xamarin Test Cloud.” As a result, it incorporates the features and functionality of Xamarin Test Cloud while adding more features, such as the ability to execute a Launch Test on real devices with the App Center Test service.

In addition, App Center provides an SDK, the infrastructure to build, test, distribute, and securely deploy apps. During tests, App Center allows you to monitor real-world usage so you can collect crash and other pertinent analytical data. 

App Center makes it easy to test and release your app on various app stores, including Google Play, Apple’s App Store, open betas, Microsoft Intune, and even for private distribution. While Visual Studio App Center is a Microsoft product, it nevertheless supports a wide range of languages such as C, C#, Python, and NodeJS.

Visual Studio App Center Standout Features & Integrations

Features include automation, continuous monitoring, rich diagnostics, continuous integration and deployment, cross-platform testing, automated testing, distributed testing, code signing, analytics, crash reporting, and notifications & alerts.

Integrations include Azure DevOps, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Others include popular bug trackers like VSTS, Jira, and GitHub. 

Visual Studio App Center is free to get started, and many of its features remain so. However, if you add concurrent builds, you’ll be billed $40 monthly per build concurrency. In addition, running UI tests in the cloud requires $99 per month per standard test device concurrency.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • A cool platform and environment for delivering world-class mobile and desktop DevOps experience.
  • It is centered on a great IDE, which is very popular among developers.

Cons:

  • It lacks video recording for tests executed in the cloud.

The Best Cloud Testing Tools Summary

Tools Price
New Relic From $25/user/month (billed annually)
Testsigma From $399/Monthly
AppPerfect Free for unlimited use
Wireshark Open source project and available for free
Cloud Sleuth Free To Use
Jenkins Open source project and available for free
BitBar Starts at $39/month
Watir Free To Use
SOASTA CloudTest Pricing upon request
Visual Studio App Center From $40 monthly per build concurrency
Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

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Other Options

Here are a few more options that didn’t make the best cloud testing tools list:

  1. Nessus

    Vulnerability management tool for the cloud

  2. AWS Device Farm

    Cloud testing service for multiple browsers and devices

  3. BlazeMeter

    Continuous cloud testing platform with open source compatibility

  4. Tuskr

    For flexible test management

  5. BugBug

    Cloud testing tool for startups and software agencies

  6. Kobiton

    Cloud-based mobile app testing platform that provides real device testing and automated testing capabilities

  7. Sauce Labs

    Cloud-based testing platform that provides automated testing of web and mobile applications on a vast array of browsers, operating systems, and devices

  8. BrowserStack

    Cloud-based platform for testing web applications, offering real device testing, automated and manual testing

  9. SmartBear TestComplete

    Functional and automated testing platform that provides a unified solution for web, mobile, desktop, and API testing

How I Selected the Best Cloud Testing Tools

Perhaps you're wondering how I selected the best cloud testing tools for this list. To build this top 19 list, I evaluated and compared a wide range of cloud testing tools with positive user ratings.

After determining my long list of top choices, I further honed my list by using the selection criteria below to see how each platform stacked up against the next one. I also drew on my years of QA experience to pinpoint the features that add a lot of value.

Selection Criteria

Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best cloud testing tools for this article:

User Interface:

The UI and graphical interface is the first thing a customer encounters when they use an app. Therefore, it should inspire usage while making navigation and discovering relevant features easy. 

Usability: 

Ease of use and the ability to interact with a tool to accomplish stated objectives are crucial to satisfying customers. No matter how advanced a product may be, customers should find it relatively easy to use.

Software Integrations: 

In the cloud computing ecosystem, software integrations are the life force that extend the power, capabilities, and functionality of an application. You'll probably want to connect your cloud testing tool to bug tracking, task management, and collaboration software. The more robust a testing tool’s APIs and integration endpoints, the better.

Pricing:

Pricing makes a difference to customers, even as most cloud products use SaaS pricing models, which is primarily a subscription-based, pay-as-you-go payment system.

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We Do the Research—so You Don’t Have To

In conclusion, cloud testing is a valuable tool to have in your arsenal if you are in the software development industry. It can provide an effective and efficient solution for testing with minimal cost and effort. The 10 best cloud testing tools listed above offer great features and unique advantages depending on your needs. To get the most out of your cloud testing experience, it is important to understand the differences between each one and select the right fit for your project.

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Eze Onukwube
By Eze Onukwube

Eze has a master's degree in communications with over 10 years of experience as a software engineer. His playground is at the intersection of technology, process improvement, and simplifying IT concepts.