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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 $49/user/month
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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:

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

Cons:

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

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:

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

Cons:

  • Outdated UI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

Best network protocol analyzer testing tool

  • Free To Use
  • 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:

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

Cons:

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

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:

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

Cons:

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

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:

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

Cons:

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

Best cloud testing service for multiple browsers and devices

  • From $0.17 device/minute

AWS Device Farm is a real-time application testing service that allows QA professionals to improve the quality of web and mobile apps. Device Farm allows you to do these without the hassles of managing or provisioning any infrastructure.

Why I picked AWS Device Farm: AWS Device Farm allows you to test on both real and physical devices, in addition to simulated environments and emulated devices, with almost the same level of effectiveness. To speed the execution of test suites, AWS Device Farm lets you simulate test scenarios with multiple browsers and devices and run concurrent tests on them.

You have the ability to use AWS Device Farm to test your scripts with its in-built frameworks, so you don’t have to maintain or even write test scripts. Additionally, employ automated tests that allow you to run tests, collect action logs, web driver logs, and video recordings, reproduce issues and fix problems faster—all in parallel. 

AWS Device Farm Standout Features & Integrations

Features include protocol decoding, live capture, offline analysis:, deep packet inspection, display filters, and advanced analytics. 

Integrations include tcpdump, TShark, libpcap, AirPcap, WinPcap, Snort, and Nmap.

AWS Device Farm pricing is divided between testing on mobile devices and testing on desktop browsers. The pricing for testing on a desktop browser is more straightforward, priced at a pay-as-you-go rate of $0.005 instance per minute. 

With regard to testing on mobile devices, it provides three pricing tiers, namely: Pay as You Go ($0.17 device per minute), Private Devices (starts at $200 per month), and Unlimited Testing (starts at $250 per month).

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Convenient pay-as-you-go option.
  • Productive integration with CI/CD pipelines.
  • Easy testing with multiple devices.

Cons:

  • The costs add up quickly if you use it substantially.

Best vulnerability management tool for the cloud

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $473.90/month for a license (billed annually)

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:

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

Cons:

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

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:

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

Cons:

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

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:

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

Cons:

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

The Best Cloud Testing Tools Summary

Tools Price
New Relic From $49/user/month
Testsigma From $399/Monthly
Cloud Sleuth Free To Use
Wireshark Free
AppPerfect Free for unlimited use
Watir Free To Use
AWS Device Farm From $0.17 device/minute
Nessus From $473.90/month for a license (billed annually)
BlazeMeter No price details
BitBar Starts at $39/month
Preview Image - <h2 class="c-block__title b-summary-table__title c-listicle__title h3" > Compare Software Specs Side by Side</h2>

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Other Options

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

  1. SOASTA CloudTest

    Best cloud performance testing application

  2. Visual Studio App Center

    Best cloud mission control center for apps

  3. Jenkins

    Best CI/CD testing server

  4. Tricentis Test Automation

    Best for agile teams

  5. BugBug

    Best cloud testing tool for startups and software agencies

  6. 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

  7. Kobiton

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

  8. BrowserStack

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

  9. Red Hat OpenShift

    Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based platform for deploying and managing containerized applications

  10. 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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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.