When you want to expand your QA testing capabilities or resources, Testlio can recruit QA specialists from their large “crowd” of QA personnel. Testlio also provides a platform to manage your tests, test runs, and results.
If you’re considering a platform-enabled QA service like Testlio, there are a handful of other noteworthy providers you should know. We’ll cover them in this piece.
If you specifically want to automate your end-to-end (E2E) software tests, Rainforest QA is the best of the Testlio alternatives — it should be on your shortlist. In short:
- Rainforest QA specializes in test automation. Testlio does not.
- Rainforest’s Test Managers use no-code and AI to deliver test coverage up to 3x faster than Testlio can using open-source frameworks.
- Rainforest’s automation tests the actual user experience, while the open-source frameworks used by Testlio simply test the code behind the user experience.
- Rainforest is designed to avoid the complaints usually associated with QA outsourcing: communication and service quality issues.
- Rainforest uniquely offers a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Contents
Testlio vs. Rainforest QA
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| SERVICES OVERVIEW | ||
| Focused on test automation | ||
| Includes platform for managing tests, test runs, and results | ||
| Includes infrastructure for running tests | ||
| Service providers are dedicated to your account | ||
| Services providers work in your time zone | ||
| Service providers join you in Slack or Teams | ||
| Integrations with JIRA, Slack, Teams | ||
| CI/CD integration | ||
| PRICING | ||
| 60-day money-back guarantee | ||
| TESTING CAPABILITIES | ||
| Web app testing | ||
| Native mobile app testing | ||
| Exploratory testing | ||
| Automation tests the actual user experience, not just the DOM | ||
| Automation can test anything on a macOS or Windows screen | ||
| Keep your tests forever in Playwright | ||
| VELOCITY | ||
| No-code for 3x faster test creation and maintenance | ||
| Multiple fallback methods to avoid test brittleness | ||
| Generative AI automatically updates broken tests | ||
| Detailed test results | ||
| TRANSPARENCY | ||
| Anyone can interpret and update tests |
Services, compared
Rainforest focuses on test automation, while Testlio mostly does manual testing
Testlio offers flexible staffing when you need to supplement your QA team. Test automation is one of many services they offer, including things like manual, usability, and accessibility testing.
They’re best known for their manual testers, who seem to make up the bulk of Testlio’s business. (This explains why almost all of Testlio’s reviews are about manual testing services.)
On the other hand, Rainforest specializes in creating and maintaining automated E2E tests for web app software teams. We focus on this one thing so we can do it well.
To us, to “do it well” means our customers can ship their web apps with velocity and confidence.
Talk to us to get a personalized demo of Rainforest QA.
Rainforest is designed to avoid common complaints about QA outsourcing
We surveyed software teams to learn about the most challenging aspects of working with outsourced QA.
The top responses? Communication and service quality issues.
We’ve designed Rainforest to offer the benefits of outsourcing — namely, affordability — without the big downsides.
As far as affordability goes, Rainforest plans start at a quarter of the cost of hiring an experienced QA engineer in the U.S. Unlike hiring, Rainforest reduces your risk with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Here’s how we deliver excellent communication and service quality:
- We dedicate one or more Test Managers to your account so they can deeply learn your product and priorities. They’ll proactively review your product documentation or videos so they can quickly respond to test coverage requests.
- Your Test Managers are fluent in English and work in your time zone.
- These experienced specialists have worked with us since at least 2017 and have been consistently highly rated by other Rainforest customers.
- Your Test Managers embed in your workflows, joining your team in your preferred tools like Slack, Teams, and JIRA. Our customers say their Test Managers feel like part of the team.
To add or update automated test coverage, you simply send your Test Managers a note or video (e.g., via Slack) and they’ll take care of the rest. They also review all test failures, proactively updating the tests that need it and reporting legitimate bugs to your software team.
They handle the time-consuming monotony of test automation, allowing your team to focus on shipping.
Reviews of Testlio mention that Testlio’s service providers join standups and other meetings, but it’s unclear if they integrate into your workflows or operate within your time zone.
So if you talk to Testlio, ask if and how they avoid the communication and service quality challenges typical of outsourcing QA.
Testing capabilities, compared
Rainforest specializes in test automation for web apps — for native mobile apps, go with Testlio
We’ve optimized Rainforest to be the safe option for automating web app testing. Trying to do too many things makes it difficult to excel at any one.
Correspondingly, Rainforest doesn’t automate testing for native mobile apps. In those cases, Testlio is your best bet. They have QA engineers who can work with open-source frameworks like Appium to automate tests for mobile apps.
Rainforest automation tests the actual user experience, unlike the open-source frameworks used by Testlio
When Testlio automates your tests, its QA engineers use open-source frameworks like Selenium, Appium, or Playwright.
One downside to open-source frameworks is that they don’t test the exact user experience of your app. Instead, these frameworks test a proxy for the user experience: the “DOM,” the behind-the-scenes code of your web app’s UI.
Rainforest’s automation, on the other hand, takes a visual-first approach. Rainforest tests evaluate and interact with the visual layer of your application, just like your users do. So Rainforest’s automated tests can give you more confidence that you’re protecting the user experience.
This visual-first approach also means Rainforest automation can test anything on a Windows or MacOS screen. (Contrast this to open-source frameworks, which are limited to testing whatever appears in a browser window.)
This means you can easily test a browser extension or confirm a downloaded file’s contents, for example.
Both Rainforest and Testlio offer exploratory testing
An effective QA strategy includes three essential types of tests:
- Unit tests. Your developers should own the creation and maintenance of unit tests, as they’re closest to the code and have the most context.
- End-to-end tests. While unit tests evaluate code components in isolation, E2E tests ensure they work well together in a system.
- Exploratory tests. Exploratory tests catch non-obvious bugs off the “happy paths” covered by your automated tests, since you can’t reasonably cover all the flows and edge cases in your app with automation.
Rainforest dedicates an on-demand team of exploratory testers to your account. The more you use them, the more familiar they become with your app and the better they can uncover issues.
Velocity, compared
Get test coverage 3x faster from Rainforest’s no-code platform vs. Testlio engineers using open source
The more changes you push to your app, the more someone needs to update your automated tests to reflect the latest, intended version of your app. (Otherwise, your test suite will return false-positive failures, undermining your team’s confidence.)
The time-consuming work to update these tests is called “test maintenance.”
Another downside of open-source frameworks is that they make test creation and maintenance particularly time-consuming. A QA team using a framework like Selenium or Playwright often bottlenecks their software team’s release process.
We hear this all the time from our customers and prospects:
”To be able to maintain automated tests, especially with a small dev team, just takes time.” – Software Engineering Lead
“In the past, we gave up on testing the front end with open source because it was too difficult to maintain and the tests were very often broken.” – Engineering Manager
“I also understand all the pain with developers maintaining the tests and the impact on velocity that it can have.” – Director of Engineering
The more complex your app (reflected in the graph below by dev team size), the more time it takes to maintain an open-source test suite.
In fact, our research shows that even teams using AI in their testing don’t spend any less time on test maintenance with open-source.
QA engineers from Testlio exclusively work in slow open-source frameworks.
With this in mind, Rainforest created a no-code test automation framework that makes it much easier to quickly create or maintain tests. Because our customers want to ship fast and frequently without painful QA bottlenecks.
Rainforest Test Managers using our AI-accelerated, no-code platform can deliver test coverage up to 3x faster than Testlio’s QA engineers using open source.
This is according to data gathered from 625 developers, including Rainforest customers. (Our customers weren’t offered incentives to report their data.)
This side-by-side comparison shows how much faster the same test can be created in Rainforest’s intuitive, no-code interface than in Playwright:
Our no-code approach also means no black boxes. Anyone on your team can quickly validate and even edit the plain-English tests our Test Managers have created. No technical skills required.
Rainforest uses patent-pending AI to avoid costly test maintenance
When you make intended changes to your web app’s appearance or functionality, Rainforest’s AI can often automatically update — or “heal” — the relevant test steps, avoiding time-consuming, human-powered test maintenance.
Unlike other off-the-shelf AI models, Rainforest’s AI takes anovel, patent-pending approach that makes it more reliable.
And any changes Rainforest’s AI makes to your tests are double-checked by your Test Managers and are completely transparent to you. You have final control over how your tests work — you can direct your Test Manager or make changes in the no-code platform yourself.
In this 50-second video, get an overview of Rainforest’s AI-powered self-healing capabilities. (You can also check out an in-depth, 6-minute demo or ask for a personal demo.)
Rainforest tests are less brittle and require less human intervention
In most automated testing tools and frameworks, a small change to an app element — like a button, text label, or link — can break the relevant tests. A test relying on a single identifier or “locator” for the element can fail when it can no longer find a match. (Testlio’s open-source tests look for identifiers in the behind-the-scenes DOM code.)
“Brittle tests” are automated tests that fail annoyingly often due to minor changes. They’re another contributor to the test maintenance burden.
Rainforest tests are less brittle because they rely on three different, automatically-generated identifiers to locate elements in your web application: visual appearance, a DOM locator, and an AI-generated element description.
Rainforest includes detailed test results for faster debugging
Every Rainforest test result includes the details your developers need to quickly investigate and resolve bugs:
- A video recording of the test
- Detailed test steps in plain English
- Browser and HTTP logs
- A JIRA integration to automatically add bug tickets
Other Testlio alternatives
If you’re interested in exploring other solutions, here are a few options:
- Test.io: Test.io is similar to Testlio in that it crowdsources its QA contributors from a large, international community, and offers test automation but focuses mostly on manual testing services.
- QA Wolf: QA Wolf is like Rainforest in that it focuses on helping businesses automate their tests. However, they handle mobile app testing in addition to web apps. Unlike Rainforest, QA Wolf engineers work exclusively in Playwright, an open-source framework. QA Wolf is among the most expensive options. Learn more about QA Wolf alternatives.
- MuukTest: MuukTest is a more affordable version of QA Wolf — they use open-source frameworks to automate tests for web and mobile. However, both limit the number of tests you can have. (With Rainforest, you can have an unlimited number of tests in your suite.) Learn more about MuukTest alternatives.
Talk to us about getting a personalized demo of Rainforest QA.
Ask about our 60-day money-back guarantee.
