Skip to main content

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)
Visit Website
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 for flexible test management

  • Free trial + free plan available
  • From $9/user/month (minimum of five users)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Tuskr is a robust, cloud-based test management tool designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of QA testing processes. It provides a user-friendly interface, making it accessible for teams of all sizes to manage their test cases and conduct test runs seamlessly in the cloud. 

Why I picked Tuskr: As a cloud testing tool, Tuskr offers a range of features that leverage the benefits of cloud infrastructure. It supports flexible test management of various types of testing, including functional, regression, performance, and security testing, all within a centralized cloud environment. This allows for easy access to testing resources and collaboration among distributed teams. Additionally, Tuskr integrates seamlessly with popular CI/CD and DevOps tools, enabling continuous testing and deployment.

Tuskr Standout Features & Integrations

Features include customizable test cases, flexible test runs, resource optimization tools, visual progress monitoring dashboards, robust security with two-factor authentication, bulk editing capabilities, and dark mode.

Integrations include Jira, Slack, Trello, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Asana, Azure DevOps, and TestRail. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface
  • Bulk edit feature helps in managing large sets of data
  • Allows for flexible and customizable test cases

Cons:

  • Number of custom fields could be expanded
  • Limited reporting options

Best highly-customizable, automation test tool

  • 30-Day free trial and free plan available
  • From $399/Monthly
Visit Website
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 continuous cloud testing platform with open source compatibility

BlazeMeter allows DevOps to run open-source-based performance tests at a massive scale with ease. It is popular with large enterprise organizations that must run and execute end-to-end unified agile methodology for continuous testing. 

Why I picked BlazeMeter: BlazeMeter tests web, mobile, or API endpoints with shift left quality early and often. It allows you to create new tests or reuse existing test scripts while producing detailed reports on an open source platform. In cases where DevOps need to verify performance at a later time, BlazeMeter provides the capability to schedule and run tests at a later time. 

BlazeMeter’s most common use case is to test and monitor CI/CD pipelines.

BlazeMeter Standout Features & Integrations

Features include continuous integration, test recorder, seamless scripting, automation, and infrastructure as code option. 

Integrations include Apache JMeter for cloud load testing. It also integrates with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins.

BlazeMeter provides three pricing tiers, namely: Starter (Free), Basic ($99/month), Pro ($499/month), and Unleashed. You’ll need to contact BlazeMeter sales for a price quote on Unleashed.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Allows QA teams to import tests from JMeter.
  • Clean interface and easy to use.
  • One of the best tools to run open-source tests from the cloud.

Cons:

  • Its Google Chrome extension needs improved stability, especially during test recordings.
  • Doesn’t provide versioning control of test cases.

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 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 vulnerability management tool for the cloud

  • 7-day free trial
  • Customized price upon request

Tenable Nessus is a cloud-based penetration scanner used to scan systems for vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations, unauthorized access, data leakage, default passwords, and denial of service attacks. Organizations use Nessus to analyze and stress test their security posture.

Why I Picked Nessus: Nessus was one of the first products that pioneered the concept of a “remote vulnerability scanner.” Among other features, Nessus provides vulnerability testing and configuration assessment. 

Nessus is built for security practitioners and DevSecOps rather than ordinary test teams. Its point-in-time assessment can be used to identify and fix vulnerabilities quickly. 

Configuration is easy so Nessus can be up and running in just a few minutes. In a nutshell, Nessus is designed so that your vulnerability assessment is convenient, simple, and intuitive.

Nessus Standout Features & Integrations 

Features include web security scanning, report customization, scalability, templates, and pre-built governance policies.

Integrations include penetration testing tools such as Core IMPACT, Metasploit, and Immunity CANVAS. It also integrates with other credential and patch management systems such as CyberArk, AirWatch, and Red Hat. 

Nessus offers a free forever plan with some feature limitations. Paid plans cost from $2190/year.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Provides quick testing vulnerability scans backed by up-to-date vulnerability databases.
  • Minimalist yet attractive GUI.
  • Easy to set up.

Cons:

  • The tool finds it challenging to tune out false positives.
  • While Nessus can pinpoint vulnerabilities, it can’t help you resolve or fix them.

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.

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.

The Best Cloud Testing Tools Summary

Tools Price
New Relic From $25/user/month (billed annually)
Tuskr From $9/user/month (minimum of five users)
Testsigma From $399/Monthly
BlazeMeter No price details
Wireshark Open source project and available for free
Cloud Sleuth Free To Use
Watir Free To Use
Nessus Customized price upon request
Visual Studio App Center From $40 monthly per build concurrency
Jenkins Open source project and available for free
Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

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.

People Also Ask

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.

Sign up for the QA Lead newsletter to receive the latest insights from top thinkers in the niche.

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.