Mobile Application Testing Tools Shortlist
Here are the top 10 mobile application testing tools I’d like to highlight out of the 20 I cover in this article:
There are a lot of mobile application testing tools to choose from, and the list is growing every day. It can be hard to know which ones are worth the investment — but they are worth the investment.
Modern app users aren't very forgiving. We've all gotten used to using convenient, high-performing mobile apps for everything from shopping to entertainment to banking. So if a user downloads a promising new app and it’s buggy, slow, or hard to navigate, they're likely to delete it and download something else.
App testing is a crucial part of app development, and ensures that your app has the performance, functionality, and appearance to make a good impression on users. Read on to get my picks for the top 20 mobile app testing tools.
What Are Mobile Application Testing Tools?
Mobile application testing tools are tools designed to assist developers and testers in testing mobile applications on various mobile devices, operating systems, and network conditions. Mobile app testing tool provide a range of testing capabilities, including functional testing, performance testing, compatibility testing, and security testing, among others.
Mobile application testing tools automate the testing process, allowing testers to save time and effort and identify issues and bugs that can impact the end-users' experience. Mobile apps testing tools can also improve collaboration and communication among teams, ensuring that testing results are accurate, reliable, and comprehensive. Mobile application testing tools play a critical role in ensuring that mobile applications are of high quality, meet end-users' expectations, and provide a positive user experience.
Overviews Of The 20 Best Mobile Application Testing Tools
Here’s a brief description of each mobile application testing tool to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Mobot
Best fully managed mobile testing tool
Mobot is a full-service platform that specializes in using mechanical robots to test mobile devices. With Mobot, QA teams can offload tests that were previously only testable via manual testing and automate them with real robots.
It is a new, unique approach that actually removes manual testing from the day-to-day responsibilities of QAs. Mobot's team plus robot fleet fully manage all aspects of testing from execution to documentation, reporting, and more. Mobot can automatically open JIRA tickets and send slack pings with test results and reproducible steps for bugs and abnormalities.
Another detail worth highlighting is Mobot's ability to run tests in parallel. You can test your mobile app on 200+ physical Android and iOS devices (not emulators) at the same time, which is very impressive. This essentially accomplishes what a human tester could complete within 5 days in the span of 1 full workday, speeding up your testing process considerably.
Integrations are available with Slack, Jira, and TestRail.
Mobot costs from $1,500/month/action (tap, swipe, click, etc.) and offers a 30-day free trial.
New Relic
Best to correlate backend and frontend
New Relic is a mobile testing tool that is designed to help you monitor everything from the backend to the front end of your app, making it a comprehensive solution for mobile application testing.
I chose New Relic as one of the best mobile application testing tools because it offers a complete suite of features that cater to different aspects of app performance monitoring. It's not just about finding bugs and crashes, but also about understanding how your app is performing in real time and how users are interacting with it.
New Relic's user experience monitoring tools help you understand how people are interacting with your app. You can track user sessions, see which features are most popular, and even create custom dashboards to visualize the data that matters most to your business. This level of insight can help you make informed decisions about how to improve your app and keep your users happy.
New Relic integrates with over 500 apps that include cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI, communication tools like Slack and PagerDuty, and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.
New Relic costs from $49/user/month and has a free version available with feature limitations.
Kobiton
Best mobile-first testing platform purpose-built for enterprises
Kobiton is a mobile app testing platform that’s great for fast manual and automated testing. You can quickly and easily perform functional, performance, and visual tests using Kobiton’s scriptless solution.
The best way to replicate the user experience is to test your app on a wide variety of real devices. But you might not have the resources to buy enough test phones or the time to test on each mobile device. Kobiton lets you run tests on a farm of 350+ real iOS and Android devices in the public cloud. You can also use it to test on your own devices.
Kobiton integrates with the major CI/CD platforms as well as Jira.
BrowserStack
Best for testing on 3000+ real devices and browsers
When it comes to testing your app on a wide range of real devices, it’s hard to beat BrowserStack. The cloud-based solution allows for testing on 3000+ real devices and browsers. BrowserStack is a powerful solution that runs over two million tests every day across 15 global data centers.
BrowserStack offers two types of mobile app testing: App Live and App Automate.
App Live lets you interact naturally with a remote device like you would one in your hand. You can use the app in real-world conditions and inspect and debug your app as you go. App Automate lets you speed up your test cycles by running concurrent tests across thousands of devices.
BrowserStack’s most popular integrations include Selenium and Jenkins. It also integrates with a long list of CI/CD solutions, automation frameworks, and other tools.
Headspin
Best for AI-based geolocation and performance testing tool with thousands of devices
HeadSpin is a mobile app testing tool that allows users to remotely test and debug mobile, web, audio, and video applications on thousands of devices and operating systems. You can test the app in multiple scenarios and easily see any differences.
For many app developers, testing an app on a variety of new and old Android and iOS devices isn’t enough — you have to make sure the app works well around the world. HeadSpin is a great tool for testing apps globally, thanks to its geolocation testing. This type of test covers the app against any geography-dependent factors like data bandwidth and network infrastructure.
HeadSpin’s integrations include automation frameworks like Appium and Selenium, CI/CD tools like Azure and Jenkins, and Jira.
Apptim
Best to validate mobile app performance in CI/CD
Apptim lets you analyze the performance of iOS and Android apps while running them on real devices. You can generate detailed reports on app render time, power consumption, resource usage, crashes, errors, and more and share the reports with your team’s private workspace.
Testing apps on real devices rather than emulators sometimes requires changing the app’s code or installing heavy software development kits that may affect performance. Not with Apptim. It’s an easy-to-set up, lightweight tool that lets you get started quickly without making big changes to your app.
Apptim integrates with Jira, allowing you to publish and track the bugs that you find directly in your project management tool.
Perfecto
Best cloud-based continuous testing with scriptless self-healing capabilities
Perfecto is a cloud-based solution that lets you automate web and mobile app testing with both code and codeless options. It’s one of the stronger tools for finding every possible defect, as it offers detailed information from dashboards, heatmaps, videos, screenshots, and crash logs across a range of devices.
A common obstacle to testing apps at scale is the fragility of test automation scripts. Scripts can break due to changes to the UI, a lack of maintenance, incorrect testing frameworks, and more. Perfecto’s self-healing algorithm makes automatic updates to the testing flow so that you can keep testing without devoting resources to fixing the test script.
Perfecto has an impressive list of integrations, including IDEs, continuous integration tools, and test automation frameworks.
Test Project
Best free, community-based end-to-end testing for web, mobile, and API apps
Let’s start with the most unique feature of TestProject — it’s totally free. TestProject is an open-source tool built on Appium and Selenium that offers codeless testing for Android and iOS apps.
TestProject is easy for anyone to use. For example, you can create tests simply by interacting with your mobile app. Every step you take is recorded and automatically turned into a test. If you want to get into more advanced test creation, you can export your recorded tests as code so that your developers can extend or customize them.
As an open-source app, TestProject has 1,500+ community-generated add-ons that can be used to extend the tool’s capabilities and integrations.
Ranorex Studio
Best for powerful cross-platform GUI testing for desktop, web, and mobile apps
Ranorex Studio is one of the strongest solutions for cross-platform testing on the market. A single Ranorex Studio license lets you run automated tests across a wide variety of legacy and modern systems. For Android and iOS, Ranorex supports testing on both real devices and emulators.
Ranorex has a feature set worthy of expert users, but the ability to create tests with a simple drag-and-drop UI also makes it suitable for beginners. It’s known for its object identification capabilities. For instance, the Ranorex Spy tool identifies and analyzes all types of objects, including dynamic UI elements.
Ranorex’s many integrations include Jira and Bugzilla for issue management, TestRail and TestShell for test management, and Azure DevOps and Jenkins for build and release management.
Eggplant
Best AI-assisted test automation tool with a best-in-class UI
Eggplant is an easy-to-use tool for testing UX across web, desktop, and mobile applications. User reviews of this solution consistently rave about its usability for beginners and expert testers alike.
Eggplant uses machine learning to shift from manual testing to automated testing, facilitating a rapid release cycle. Continuous testing and compatibility checks help you eliminate errors and inconsistencies before the app is released to production.
Eggplant offers integrations with CI/CD tools, including Jenkins, Bamboo, GitHub, and more.
Summary Of The Best Mobile Application Testing Tools
Here’s my side-by-side comparison chart to help you see how each tool stacks up to the rest at a glance.
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mobot Best fully managed mobile testing tool | 30-day free trial | $1,500/month/action (tap, swipe, click, etc.) | Visit Website |
| 2 | New Relic Best to correlate backend and frontend | Free version available | From $49/user/month | Visit Website |
| 3 | Kobiton Best mobile-first testing platform purpose-built for enterprises | 14-day free trial | From $75/month | Visit Website |
| 4 | BrowserStack Best for testing on 3000+ real devices and browsers | Free trial available | Starts at $29/month | Visit Website |
| 5 | Headspin Best for AI-based geolocation and performance testing tool with thousands of devices | Free Trial | $99/user/month | Visit Website |
| 6 | Apptim Best to validate mobile app performance in CI/CD | Free plan for individual user / 10-minute sessions | Unlimited users / 60-minute sessions starting at $99/user/month | Visit Website |
| 7 | Perfecto Best cloud-based continuous testing with scriptless self-healing capabilities | 14-day free trial | From $83/month | Visit Website |
| 8 | Test Project Best free, community-based end-to-end testing for web, mobile, and API apps | Free | Free | Visit Website |
| 9 | Ranorex Studio Best for powerful cross-platform GUI testing for desktop, web, and mobile apps | 30-day free trial available | Plans start at $3950 for a single-machine, perpetual license | Visit Website |
| 10 | Eggplant Best AI-assisted test automation tool with a best-in-class UI | Not available | Starts at $3,400 for a single test stream | Visit Website |
Other Options
The 10 mobile testing tools above are just a small selection of the available options. Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Appium
Best open-source framework for iOS, Android, and Windows apps
- BitBar
Best for framework agnostic testing on cloud and local devices
- Endtest
Best for no code mobile test automation
- MagicPod
Best for complex testing scenarios
- TestGrid
Mobile app testing with low-code authoring and management of test cases
- testRigor
A mobile app testing tool that lets you perform automated tests with nothing but plain English commands
- Test.io
Full range of web, mobile, and IoT testing with a flexible service model
- Xcode
Integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS that allows developers to create apps for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS platforms
- TestComplete
Automated UI tests with AI-powered object recognition
- Cucumber
Tool for behavior-driven development (BDD) that allows for collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders
Selection Criteria For The Best Mobile Application Testing Tools
If you're wondering how I selected the best mobile application testing tools, here's where I'll break it all down for you. First of all, I started with mobile apps testing tools that have high user review and satisfaction ratings. Then, using my experience in QA, I discerned what key criteria were most important for any mobile app testing tool and compared how each of them stacked up against the rest.
I empathize with how much time it takes to source the right software for a job. I do this work so that you don't have to. I've been using and reviewing tools to test mobile applications for years so you can trust me to do the heavy lifting and compile all the facts you need to make your final decision.
After careful consideration, I've determined that these are the most important criteria when selecting the best mobile app testing tool. Here's a brief list outlining the whats and whys of my selection:
Key Features
These are a few of the features and functionalities I looked for while researching each tool:
- Automation vs. manual testing: Both automated and manual software testing have their use cases. I’ll look into whether the solution uses one type or both.
- Test types: Being able to run tests of different kinds, like load testing, regression testing, functional testing, performance testing, security testing, automation testing, ETL testing, cross-browser testing, UI tests, penetration testing, and more.
- Test scenarios: Running tests under different circumstances, like parallel tests, continuous testing, device testing, and more.
- Real devices vs. simulators: Software testing on real devices offers insights into the user experience that simulators can’t offer. I’ll look at which type of test devices are offered.
- Cross-platform testing: Which platforms and device types can be tested?
- OS Agnostic: Develop mobile apps compatible with all popular smartphone and personal device operating systems, like Windows, Apple OSs (MacOS, iOS), and Android.
- Programming language & framework inclusive: Inclusive of all programming languages and frameworks you might encounter from PHP, Java, Python, JavaScript, Espresso, Ruby, Robotium, Calabash, etc.
- Test management: Tools for test creation, test execution, test reporting, and managing test cases and test scripts.
Usability
Usability is a crucial factor to consider when selecting a mobile application testing tool as it directly impacts the tool's effectiveness and efficiency. A user interface that’s easy to use and navigate can help testers save time and effort, leading to quicker and more accurate results. The usability of the mobile application testing tools can also impact the testing process's reliability and validity, ensuring that the testing results accurately reflect the application's performance.
Depth of Testing
Depth of testing is a critical factor to consider when selecting a mobile application testing tool as it directly impacts the quality and effectiveness of the testing process. A tool for testing mobile application that offers comprehensive testing capabilities, including functional, performance, security, and compatibility testing, can identify a broader range of issues and bugs, ensuring that the application meets the end-users' expectations. I’ve noted the depth each testing platform can offer in my overviews.
Integrations
Software integrations are a critical factor to consider when selecting a mobile application testing tool as they can impact the tool's functionality and compatibility with other tools in the testing process. I looked at native integrations with tools like GitHub and Jira, and I also took APIs to build custom integrations with into account.
Pricing
Pricing is an essential factor to consider when selecting a mobile application testing tool as it directly impacts the budget and resources allocated for testing. The cost of the testing tool can vary significantly depending on its features, capabilities, and licensing options. The pricing model must align with the project budget and requirements, ensuring that the testing process is cost-effective without sacrificing the quality of the testing results.
People Also Ask: Questions About Mobile Application Testing
Here were a few questions I wanted to answer before I send you on your way.
What are the benefits of mobile application testing tools?
What’s the difference between mobile app testing and web app testing?
How do I perform mobile app testing?
What do you think about this list?
There’s a mobile app testing solution for every need. The list above should get you started finding the best mobile testing tool for your business.
Do you agree with this list? Feel free to let us know in the comments if you have experience with any of these tools or if you want to recommend a different solution.
To get more insights from top thinkers in the field, sign up for the QA Lead newsletter.